Master Plans. International Town Planning Competitions and the Reinvention of the City, 1890 to 1930

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Groß-Wien, Gran Barcelona, Mare Bucuresti: The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a series of large international town planning competitions, organized to select the most promising schemes for rebuilding and expanding big cities in almost every region of the world. These events aimed at nothing less than developing all-encompassing plans for creating the cities of the future. At least 50 ambitious competitions took place between the 1890s and the 1920s, spanning Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia. Their scope was truly international, as competitors and juries came from numerous different countries. Moreover, town planning competitions rapidly created their own dense web of references, as participants engaged in lively exchanges of ideas and began to build on earlier competitions.Striving to comprehensively plan the whole of the city, these competitions opened up a novel space of ideas as well as of practices. The proposed project aims at reconstructing and interpreting the history of these international events for the first time. By means of several case studies covering the whole period in question as well as various world regions, the project explores the views of modern life articulated in the competitions, the competing visions of the future discussed in the process and the role of transnational comparisons and transfers in shaping ideas of the modern city. The study focuses four levels: the attempts of experts to devise supposedly rational solutions for the glaring social ills caused by the dynamic urban growth of the mid-19th century, rivaling visions of social order, conflicts of interest and the evolving international framework of town planning competitions.Illuminating the history of town planning competitions, the study will place its findings in larger historiographical contexts. It aims at deepening our understanding of the discourse on town planning among European experts, transcending the perspectives that historians of city building and city planning have pursued so far. Furthermore, the project provides fresh impulses for comparative and transnational urban history, highlighting the interconnections between cities in the early phase of globalization. Finally, the study will expand research on technocratic planning, social engineering and Fordism by widening the time frame to include the later 19th century, by examining regions beyond Europe and by studying sets of actors that have gone largely unnoticed so far. Framing international town planning competitions as a crucial forum, the project seeks to demonstrate that the rise of large-scale, at times even totalitarian planning emerged from an overlap of local, national, international, and global initiatives.