Michael Hebbert

The street as locus of collective memory

In discussing the role of streets and urban spaces as a locus of collective memory, I draw a distinction between overt commemoration of public memory and the accumulation of group memories in the setting of the everyday street. Community struggles over postwar street clearances stimulated interest in the physical layout of the public realm as a gestalt for shared memory, a theme of earlier work on memory and urbanism by Maurice Halbwachs. I show how Aldo Rossi and colleagues put the concept onto a practical footing by making morphological analysis the basis for urban infill, repair, and extension, most ambitiously and controversially in the ‘critical reconstruction’ of modern Berlin.

Engineering, Urbanism and the Struggle for Street Design

The making and upkeep of streets is a central task of urban design. In a critical review of the relation between urban design and highway engineering, the paper distinguishes two paradigms: on one side, the hierarchical model, pervasive and institutionally entrenched through design standards and traffic management; on the other, an alternative non-hierarchical paradigm which has developed piecemeal and experimentally on the back of policies for social exclusion, city centre regeneration, liveable neighbourhoods and neo-traditional urbanism. The paper discusses the tension between the two frameworks and highlights the health, safety and environmental arguments for reinventing the mixed-use urban street.

European cities in a networked world during the long 20th century

In this paper we argue that the contemporary revival of European municipalism should be examined within the rich context of the ‘long’ 20th century and the many and varied links forged between municipalities across national borders. In the first two sections we trace the emergence of the networked European municipality from the ad hoc individual connections made during the final decades of the 19th century, through the golden age of municipal internationalism during the interwar years, to the intensive cross-national cooperation pursued in the aftermath of the Second World War. We argue that the historical experience of these municipal connections was an essential prerequisite of the long-term move towards the multilevel networking experienced by European municipalities today. In the final section we focus on Eurocities, the main European municipal lobby group since the late 1980s, to show how municipalities have continued to utilise networking as their main tool within a supranational Europe, in effect to reinvent themselves within a globalised postindustrial economy.

Cities and Climate Change: The Precedents and Why They Matter

This paper reviews the long tradition of city-scale climatological and meteorological applications prior to the emergence in the 1990s of early work on the urban/global climate change interface. It shows how ‘valuing and seeing the urban’ came to be achieved within modern scientific meteorology and how in a limited but significant set of cases that science has contributed to urban practice. The paper traces the evolution of urban climatology since 1950 as a distinct research field within physical geography and meteorology, and its transition from observational monographs to process modelling; reviews the precedents, successful or otherwise, of knowledge transfer from science into public action through climatically aware regulation or design of urban environment; and notes the neglect of these precedents in contemporary climate change discourse—a serious omission.

Hidden climate change – urban meteorology and the scales of real weather

This paper discusses the scale at which the weather is experienced and modified by human activities in urban environment. The climates of built-up areas differ from their non-urban counterparts in many aspect: wind-flows, radiation, humidity, precipitation and air quality all change in the presence of human settlement, transforming each city into a singularity within its regional weather system. Yet this pervasive category of anthropogenic climate change has always tended to be hidden and difficult to discern. The paper first describes the sequence of discovery of the urban heat island since the early nineteenth century, and the emergence and consolidation of a scientific field devoted to the climatology of cities. This is followed by a discussion of various attempts to apply knowledge of climatic factors to the design and management of settlement. We find that real-world application of urban climatology has met with limited success. However, the conclusion suggests that global climate change gives a new visibility and practical relevance to urban-scale climate science.

Town Planning versus Urbanismo

The point of departure of this article is the contrast drawn by Giorgio Piccinato between ‘Anglo‐Saxon’ town planning and ‘Latin’ urbanism, one based on rational method and theory of planning as intervention, the other on architecture, urban morphology and project‐based action. Gordon Cherry and Oriol Bohigas represent the two poles of the dichotomy – Cherry because of the emphasis he placed on separation from architecture in the professional emergence of the UK’s Royal Town Planning Institute, Bohigas because of his equally insistent emphasis on reintegrating planning with its mother discipline. The paper sets Bohigas and the regeneration of Barcelona into the wider context of a postmodern urbanism troubled by the neighbouring internecine rivalry between modernist and traditionalist architects. It is argued that Barcelona’s most distinctive contribution is less the replacement of ‘plans’ by ‘projects’ than its reconciliation of modernism and contextualism, a lesson duly acknowledged in the Anglo‐Saxon planning world through an award of the RIBA Gold Medal. This narrative of the triumph of urbanism ends with the RTPI’s acceptance that making place and mediating space are at the heart of town planning.

Applied Climatology in Urban Planning - A Knowledge Circulation Failure

The article discusses an instance of knowledge that failed to circulate — the application of urban climatology in town planning. This field of applied science was systematized in German-speaking universities and cities and remains most firmly established in North-Central Europe. In the decades after the second world war successive commissions and study groups of the World Meteorological Organization, the International Federation of Housing and Planning, the Confederation Internationale du Bâtiment and the International Society for Biometeorology sought to spread awareness of climatological factors among planners and architects worldwide. The article examines the organizations and individuals involved in this campaign, describes their meetings, publications and outreach, and assesses the disappointing impact. The legacy of this failure is considered in the context of present-day interest in planning for carbon mitigation and climate-change adaptation.

THE CITY OF LONDON WALKWAY EXPERIMENT

Abstract Planners have frequently proposed but rarely implemented vertically segregated pedestrian circulation routes. One of the more conservative planning authorities in Britain, the Corporation of the City of London, became involved after World War II in an experiment with high-level pedestrian walkways. Initially reluctant, the corporation became an enthusiastic pioneer of vertical segregation, imposing it on office developers within Londons central business district, the Square Mile. Though much walkway has been built, little was ever joined up and most remains unused. This paper explores the genesis of the City of London walkway experiment and accounts for its failure.

Integrating Rail and Land Use Development

Nineteenth-century Baedeker guides to Europe’s historic cities contained incomparable steel-engraved maps. Relief was shown in sepia, water in blue and urban topography in crisp black figure-ground. As the national railway networks grew in the second half of the century, their thin black tentacles snaked through the Baedeker plans and urban street patterns could be seen extending eagerly to meet them. Extension plans made railway station entrances into terminal vistas for axial boulevards linking old centres to new nodes. The station clock could be seen from afar but its newly built forecourt became an enclosure framed by the tallest buildings outside the historic centre, lined with hotels, shops and cafés to welcome the traveller. Trees and statues dignified the station approach and marked a point of serenity in a perpetual motion of cabs, trams, wagons, carriages and pedestrians. Successive editions of Baedeker guides plotted the transformation for the benefit of travellers. Never before in urban history had new patterns of centrality taken root so rapidly and so universally, and it was generally a velvet revolution that enhanced rather than diminished the primacy of the historic town centre. That early marriage of civil engineering and urbanism left an unrivalled legacy of railway plazas that still function in their dual role as transport nodes and urban places. Contemporary planners were aware of these relationships between railway stations and urban form: Spain’s Arturo Soria developed his theory of transitoriented linear cities (Velez, 1982) as a basis for continued urban growth, and Britain’s Raymond Unwin (Unwin, 1909) developed his vision for station plazas as city gateways. Garden city and suburb promoters around the world saw their settlements as beads on strings, dignifying stations as the focal points for community design. Integrated design of stations and their settings continued well into the 20th century, whether in the concourses of terminal buildings or in local stations such as those designed by Holden for the London Underground or by Schelling for the Amsterdam suburbs (Pevsner, 1976). After the Second World War the urban integration of stations became more problematic. Developers and retailers became less interested in the rail traveller, road traffic provision downgraded and disrupted the older station gateway, and

Urban Design Since 1945—A Global Perspective

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