Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880, 4th Edition

Preface to the Third Edition

That original preface might have been written in another age: WordStar (and the operating system on which it ran, CP/M) are historical memories; personal computers, each exponentially more powerful than the last, have come and gone on my desk; much of this revision was produced in direct connection with the World Wide Web. But the history itself has dated less, I think: 13 years out of a century is not a very long time; the main themes remain those that already concerned us in the 1980s, albeit now seen through different intellectual and political filters; there has been an explosion of scholarship in planning history, but no fundamental reinterpretation of it.

I am grateful to many readers for making the book profitable enough to justify this revision, and to those who have told me they enjoyed it. My special thanks go to some 15 generations of students at Berkeley and UCL, who have come to my classes in planning history and helped illuminate my thinking; and to Rob Freestone, for his stupendous labors in organizing the major conference on twentieth-century planning history in Sydney in 1999, which brought together researchers from all over the world and produced such a splendid record.¹ And familial thanks to John Hall, who supplied a fascinating monograph on the pioneer cité-jardin in his home town of Suresnes.

This is a more fundamental revision than I attempted in 1996, which simply consisted of a supplementary chapter. That has now been brought ...