Postwar Urbanisms 

Undergraduate 

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This seminar investigates urban planning’s global turn in the decades after the Second World War. The period saw the construction of massive, often state-intervened urban projects that kick-started the mid-century project of modernization, the world over. Planners and designers began to develop tools and vocabularies to navigate new models of practice on an international scale. The postwar years saw a distinct development in the discipline of planning and urban design through the global exchange of expertise, set against a context that was shaped by decolonization, partition, migration, the formation of new nation-states, and the reconfiguration of old ones. How did planners, architects, and urban designers respond to the social and political challenges of the postwar world order? Which were the main theories developed around the planner and urban designer’s responses to sociopolitical questions?  We will answer these questions by looking at some of the major urban projects of the twentieth century and analyzing the points of exchanges between cultures and expertise. Through readings, discussions, and case studies, the course will unpack how the international mobility of labor, commodities, and capital in the postwar decades transformed urban planning and urban design practice.