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

Preface to the Fourth Edition

Another decade, another leap in technology: this new edition was written almost in its entirety in my home office – which happened to be in London, but could almost as well have been on Tierra del Fuego – with the aid of broadband access to the riches of the UCL Library, which could equally have been any well-equipped university library. So scholarship is increasingly liberated from the tyranny of geography – but, not entirely so, because it has also depended on the devoted assistance of Carlos Galvis and Liron Schur, who did much of the basic ground-clearing, checking for new literature, locating and downloading it, and deftly converting Adobe into Microsoft Word, ready for the various steps of academic surgery. Thanks especially to them, and to various colleagues who smoothed the path in different ways.

Thanks also to Caroline Hensman, who undertook an epic job of picture research after the original illustrations disappeared in the translation from Blackwell to Wiley Blackwell; to Giles Flitney, who expertly copy-edited the entire text, old material and new, from ground zero; and to Ben Thatcher at Wiley, who oversaw the long and complex process.

And finally, as always over a quarter-century of academic distraction and lack of proper attention to the things that really matter, to Magda, who has massively compensated for my multiple (and now fast-multiplying) deficiencies.

Peter Hall

London, December 2013