Peter Hall's Cities of Tomorrow: A History of Urban Planning

Cities of Tomorrow (1988) is the intellectual history of urban planning written by Peter Hall, the British geographer and professor at Berkeley and University College London, and it remains the standard account of how the great planning ideas of the twentieth century were born and what they produced. Its thesis is uncomfortable: almost every vision meant to cure the ills of the industrial city, from the garden city to the tower in the park, ended up applied differently from what its authors imagined, and often created new problems. Understanding that gap between idea and outcome is the best vaccine against the next utopia.

From the industrial city to Howard's garden city

Hall begins with the city of dreadful night, the London, New York and Berlin of the late nineteenth century where overcrowding, cholera and the misery of working-class districts scandalised reformers and novelists. Planning as a discipline was born from that fear: first as public health and social housing, then as a project for the whole city. The first radical answer was Ebenezer Howard's garden city (1898), which proposed self-contained communities of 32,000 people surrounded by countryside with the land held collectively. Letchworth and Welwyn built it; Britain's postwar new towns adopted it at national scale.

The currents of the twentieth century according to Peter Hall

The book gives separate chapters to each major current. The city of monuments, Daniel Burnham's City Beautiful in Chicago and Washington. The city in the region, of Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford, which thought in terms of whole territories. The city of towers, of Le Corbusier, whose Ville Radieuse of high-rise blocks set in parks inspired public housing estates across the world. The city on the highway, of Robert Moses and the American suburb. And the city of sweat equity, the self-built settlements of the Global South that John Turner defended as a solution rather than a problem.

Hall's critique of modernism

Hall is especially critical of the modernist legacy. He acknowledges that Le Corbusier and CIAM solved real problems of light, air and sanitation, but shows how their principles, applied by hurried administrations on tight budgets, produced the isolated blocks, dead spaces and separation of functions that Jane Jacobs denounced in 1961. The demolition of Pruitt-Igoe in Saint Louis in 1972 marks for Hall the symbolic end of that faith and the start of a more modest planning, focused on regeneration and participation.

The final chapters address the city of theory, the Marxist and feminist turn of the 1970s that asked whom planning served, and the city of enterprise, the deregulation of the 1980s exemplified by London's Docklands, where planning gave way to private initiative. Hall closes with the city of the permanent underclass, warning that neither technocratic planning nor the free market has solved concentrated urban poverty, which was the problem that started everything a century earlier.

Why Cities of Tomorrow still matters

The lasting value of Cities of Tomorrow, which Hall revised in successive editions up to 2014, lies in its method: following each idea from the book that formulated it to the neighbourhood that applied it, and measuring the distance. It teaches that planning is not a cumulative science but a succession of reactions, that good intentions do not guarantee good places, and that the city of tomorrow usually resembles the city of yesterday with new problems. For anyone studying or practising planning, it remains the best introduction available.