Session Abstract

This panel will explore anti-urbanism within the theory and practice of city planning in the 20^th century. It will examine the intellectual history of anti-urbanism and its social context: what gives rise to the form that anti-urbanism takes and how does this form change. It will then probe a number of cases of anti-urban city planning and ruralization of the population in Germany, Italy, and Spain. In keeping with the conference theme of communities and networks, this panel will address the ways that anti-urban city planners criticized urban space, particularly how they believed that urban space formed malignant social networks and communities or corrupted healthy social networks and communities. Furthermore, the panel will probe how these anti-urban city planners sought to transform urban space in order to foster “healthy” networks and communities. Parker Everett, of the University of Chicago, will attempt to grasp the ideology of anti-urbanism and its similarity to anti-Semitism and to then explain how in the German Empire and in the Weimar Republic this anti-urbanism was worked out in spatial planning. Patrick Bernhard, of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, will present a paper on cooperation between the Axis powers in “reruralizing” the population through city planning and policies of “living space.” Till Kössler, of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, will present a paper on anti-urbanism in Francisco Franco's Spain and the similarities between left and right critics of cities there and the ways that this was instantiated in Francoist attempts to redesign Madrid. Each of these forms of planning sought, explicitly and implicitly, to transform communities and social networks. They attacked what they saw as blighted communities and dangerous social networks, such as those that constituted left political radicalism, and set out to create a more authentic form of national community and intimate social networks.