Critique and the History of Urbanization

Urbanization is among the most transformative and dynamic consequences of modern capitalist society. It changes not only the immediate space of the city, but, as William Cronon demonstrated, fundamentally reconstituted a vast sphere of space and fundamentally alter both urban and rural environments. In certain respects, city and regional planning represents an attempt to focus and make humane this spatial dynamic. It represents a realization that such a project of geographic-political-economic planning is possible, desirable, and even in a sense necessary. The goal of city planning is, by arranging urban space in the present, to create a more efficient, prosperous and free future. Between 1870 and 1930 in Greater Berlin as well as other major cities, like Chicago, this sense of the rational future that planners were creating changed: Around 1900, planners emphasized free markets, individualism, the rule of law and trade. By the early 1930s, however, planners emphasized a more integrative, corporate and productivist vision. I will argue that to understand why this change occurs one needs to engage the assumptions in the historical sources critically and to probe why such a large number of sources from different discourses take on formal, historically specific patterns. Through an examination of the self-understandings expressed in these discourses, one can gain a sense of what in the historical period was immanently possible, in terms of a more humane and rational society, and how those possibilities were denied. Furthermore, one can use this approach to understand why a particular vision of the rational city could be seen as a source of liberation, but subsequently come to be experienced as a form of domination.