News From the Field: Visual Planning and Urbanism in the Mid-Twentieth Century Conference, Newcastle, Uk, 11-13 September 2007

Abstract

While the understanding of planning or urban design through their visual aspects alone would be reductive, attitudes to planning that focus on visual and three-dimensional modes remain understudied. To fill this gap, a conference entitled, ‘Visual planning and urbanism in the mid-twentieth century’, was held in Newcastle on 11–13 September 2007. The conference focused on ‘a strand of more practical urbanism, modernist in flavour but historically informed [which sought] to recover positive conceptions of the city and town after the perceived deprivations of the nineteenth century’. The topics discussed at the conference papers focused upon the modern period, during which planners sought to rethink cities radically – as evidenced by such interventions as the CIAM doctrine codified by the Athens Charter, Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, the de-urbanist proposals contained within Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, or interpretations of the linear city by Okhitovich and Milyutin – but also remained critical of drastic restructuring.