Urban Design for an Urban Century: Shaping More Livable, Equitable, and Resilient Cities, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2Decentralization: The Rise and Decline of Industrial Cities

World War I, the world’s first fully industrialized war, swept away the romanticized picture of historic European cities and reshaped society around the globe. Europe went to war in 1914 on horseback but emerged from it in motorized vehicles. Aftershocks rumbled through every field of human activity—including architecture and city planning—and the war accelerated the pace of life, broadened the impact of industrial production, and provoked widespread social activism. In Europe, radical ideas about the rebuilding and redesign of cities broke from a familiar Renaissance-derived aesthetic and practice to proffer a vision of a world reborn through technology and progressive political ideas, the manifestation of which became known collectively as the International Style. In the United States these impulses took a very different path, one cleared by scouts as unalike as General Motors and Frank Lloyd Wright and leading not to the hearts of cities but to their leafy green edges: the suburbs.

Proto-Urban Design: Rejecting a Classical Past to Shape an Industrial Future

Europe: Modernizing the past

L’Esprit nouveau

Surrounded by the devastation of the war, the world looked to the future. The 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts) in Paris, a seminal global showcase, launched the streamlined art deco motifs that ...