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Boom Cities: Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain Kindle Edition

by Otto Saumarez Smith (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Boom Cities is the first published history of the profound transformations of British city centres in the 1960s.

It has often been said that urban planners did more damage to Britain's cities than even the Luftwaffe had managed, and this study details the rise and fall of modernist urban planning, revealing its origins and the dissolution of the cross-party consensus, before the ideological smearing that has ever since characterized the high-rise towers, dizzying ring roads, and concrete precincts that were left behind.

The rebuilding of British city centres during the 1960s drastically affected the built form of urban Britain, including places ranging from traditional cathedral cities through to the decaying towns of the industrial revolution. Boom Cities uncovers both the planning philosophy, and the political, cultural, and legislative background that created the conditions for these processes to occur across the country.

Boom Cities reveals the role of architect-planners in these transformations. The volume also provides an unconventional account of the end of modernist approaches to the built environment, showing it from the perspective of planning and policy elites, rather than through the emergence of public opposition to planning.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A most terrific book that should, in all honesty, have been written years ago." -- David Marx, David Marx:Book Reviews

"Otto Saumarez Smith's Boom Cities is another first-rate book: a deep and detailed dive into the urban history of 1960s Britain. Also based on a doctoral thesis, it is likewise an excellent illustration of an approach―though in this case, of course, he exemplifies one of the many strands of eclecticism...he is far more than a sum of his supervision, his work does draw on both architectural history and Mandler's version of cultural history. It tells the story of architect planners: that small group of men (and they were almost always all men) who redesigned Britain's inner cities in the period between social democratic post war reconstruction and what might be seen as the rise of neoliberalism." -- William Whyte, University of Oxford, Journal of Modern History

About the Author

Otto Saumarez Smith, Assistant Professor in Architectural History, University of Warwick

Otto Saumarez Smith is an architectural and urban historian, and is an Assistant Professor in Art History at the University of Warwick.