Stefan Couperus

Experimental Spaces: A Decentered Approach to Planning in High Modernity

1 U. Herbert, «Europe in High Modernity. Reflections on a Theory of the 20th Century», Journal of Modern European History 5 (2007) 2, 5–21. 2 L. Raphael (ed.), Theorien und Experimente der Moderne, Cologne 2012; C. Dipper / L. Raphael, «‹Raum› in der europäischen Geschichte. Einleitung», Journal of Modern European History 9 (2011) 1, 27–41; C. Dipper, «Moderne, Version: 1.0», Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 25.08.2010, URL: http://docupedia.de/zg/Moderne?oldid=84639 (last visited 24 March 2014); T. Etzemüller (ed.), Die Ordnung der Moderne: Social Engineering im 20. Jahrhundert, Bielefeld 2009. 3 A. Escobar, «Planning», in: W. Sachs (ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London 2010, 146. 4 Escobar, «Planning», 146–147. Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the scholarly interest in planning and social engineering, which became widespread in the Western world as well as the colonies and postcolonial states in the age of High Modernity. This age, covering the years between 1890 and 1970, has been distinguished from other periods, firstly, by the sheer rapidity of economic, social and cultural changes, such as industrialisation, urbanisation, mass emigration, and the «scientification» of society.1 What qualifies this period as distinctively modern, however, is that contemporaries themselves were aware that they were entering a «new» era, which offered increased opportunities to shape their own future.2 The modern became a category of self-identification, combining a sense of crisis with a strong belief in the possibility to perfect society through interventions. Expectations were high: Modernity itself would provide the means, such as scientific knowledge and technological innovations, to channel the sweeping changes and restore a stable order in the post-liberal age. «Planning» as a concept «embodies the belief that social change can be engineered and directed, produced at will».3 Its emergence at the end of the nineteenth century should be attributed to the rise of the modern political economy, which fostered an instrumental attitude towards nature and people. In reaction to the disturbing social consequences produced by laissez-faire capitalism, industrialisation and urbanisation, professionals and experts launched initiatives to improve social conditions, resulting in the rise of town planning and the incipient welfare state. The state – and at times socially minded industrialists too – became the guarantor of social progress.4 Stefan Couperus, Liesbeth van de Grift, Vincent Lagendijk

Christianne Smit, De volksverheffers. Sociaal hervormers in Nederland en de wereld, 1870-1914

Christianne Smit, De volksverheffers. Sociaal hervormers in Nederland en de wereld, 1870-1914 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2015, 444 pp., isbn 978 908 704 546 3).

In Search of the Social: Neighborhood and Community in Urban Planning in Europe and Beyond, 1920-1960

This introductory text presents the overarching question that informs the articles in this special section: How have notions of neighborhood and community determined urban planning discourse and practice in mid-twentieth century Europe? Against the backdrop of World Wars, crises and recovery schemes, aspirations to repair – or create – social cohesion among urban dwellers were manifest in the parlance and actions of a range of historical actors, many of which were at the heart of urban planning and reconstruction: architects, sociologists, administrators, planners and local officials. This special section covers different temporal and geographical contexts in Europe (and the US) to disentangle multilayered notions of ‘the social’ that have permeated neighborhood and community planning schemes. Moreover, taken together, the articles will show how persistent dichotomies in urban planning historiography, such as top-down versus bottom-up or organic versus mechanic, obscure historical understandings of how urban communities were conceived spatially, socially and politically.

Building democracy anew: Neighbourhood planning and political reform in post-blitz Rotterdam

This article interrogates the political semantics of neighborhood planning during and after the Second World War. It argues that as much as a geographical substrate for social and spatial planning, the neighborhood was an organizing principle in agendas of urban political reform in the 1940s and 1950s. Taking the case of Rotterdam, a severely bombed city that suffered from warfare in many respects, this article discloses the languages of political reform that informed an agenda of revitalizing urban democracy within the framework of the neighborhood. Two intertwined trajectories, encompassing public and private initiatives to institutionalize modes of neighborhood politics and democracy, will show how notions of democratic citizenship and the post-war institutional design of urban governance became irreconcilable in Rotterdam, but had a lasting impact on twentieth-century urbanism.

Experimental planning after the blitz: Non-governmental planning initiatives and post-war reconstruction in Coventry and Rotterdam, 1940-1955

Experimental Planning after the Blitz. Non-governmental Planning Initiatives and Post-war Reconstruction in Coventry and Rotterdam, 1940-1955 This article probes into two non-governmental planning initiatives in the bombed cities of Coventry and Rotterdam. It articulates planning practices by non-state actors at the local level during the 1940s and early 1950s. These practices comprise a set of alternative visions on urban reconstruction and the regeneration of the urban community. Most of these social planning experiments were thwarted by the authorised planning schemes of public authorities from the early 1950s onwards. However, in engaging with recent historiography on post-war urban planning, these non-governmental experiments disclose that urban reconstruction and planning was not an uncontested or monopolised top-down endeavour that was initiated exclusively by public authorities and professional planners in the 1940s.

The Managerial Revolution in Local Government: Municipal Management and the City Manager in the US and the Netherlands, 1900-1940

This article probes into the impact of management thought on municipal administration in Amsterdam in the period 1900–1940. To understand the discursive and practical impact of management thought – and the city manager as one of its most feasible expressions – on municipal administration in its historical context, this article places this European case study against the background of the American hotbed and source of management reform in local government. Key to the comparison between the USA and the Netherlands are issues concerning the discursive and legal constructions of the legitimacy of management institutions and practices, the nature of reformist discourse and the scholarly and judicial frameworks of reference that underpinned burgeoning practices of modern management in local government.

Wouter Beekers, Het bewoonbare land. Geschiedenis van de volkshuisvestingsbeweging in Nederland

(Dissertatie Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam 2012; Amsterdam: Boom, 2012, 372 pp., ISBN 978 94 6105 657 3).