Monthly Archives: July 2016

The history of planning and the politics of history by Lucy Hewitt

A still from ‘The Proud City – A Plan for London,’ produced for the Ministry of Information in 1946. Available to view in full at https://archive.org/details/ProudCity

A still from ‘The Proud City – A Plan for London,’ produced for the Ministry of Information in 1946. Available to view in full at https://archive.org/details/ProudCity

There are few fields of study in the humanities or social sciences that remain untouched by the challenges which developed out of philosophy and social theory in the second half of the twentieth century, but British planning history is arguably one such area.  To suggest that this is the case is not meant to be read as an attempt to damn the work that currently constitutes the field, but it is intended to underline that there remains scope for further work that would expand and multiply histories of British planning, perhaps unsettling but also enriching what is currently a rather singular field. Continue reading