Planning Perspectives, 21 (July 2006) 233–251

Town planning versus urbanismo

MICHAEL HEBBERT*
School of Environment & Development, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PLUK (e-mail:
michael.hebbert@manchester.ac.uk)
Planning
10.1080/02665430600731153
RPPE_A_173079.sgm
0266-5433
Original
Taylor
302006
21
michael.hebbert@manchester.ac.uk
MICHAELHEBBERT
00000July
and
& Article
Perspectives
Francis
(print)/1466-4518
Francis
2006 Ltd (online)

The point of departure of this article is the contrast drawn by Giorgio Piccinato between ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ town planning and ‘Latin’ urbanism, one based on rational method and theory of planning as
intervention, the other on architecture, urban morphology and project-based action. Gordon Cherry
and Oriol Bohigas represent the two poles of the dichotomy – Cherry because of the emphasis he
placed on separation from architecture in the professional emergence of the UK’s Royal Town Plan-
ning Institute, Bohigas because of his equally insistent emphasis on reintegrating planning with its
mother discipline. The paper sets Bohigas and the regeneration of Barcelona into the wider context of
a postmodern urbanism troubled by the neighbouring internecine rivalry between modernist and tradi-
tionalist architects. It is argued that Barcelona’s most distinctive contribution is less the replacement of
‘plans’ by ‘projects’ than its reconciliation of modernism and contextualism, a lesson duly acknowl-
edged in the Anglo-Saxon planning world through an award of the RIBA Gold Medal. This narrative
of the triumph of urbanism ends with the RTPI’s acceptance that making place and mediating space
are at the heart of town planning.

Introduction

Giorgio Piccinato offers the following distinction between urbanismo and town planning
[1]. Town planning is Anglo-Saxon, urbanism is Latin. Planning sees itself as a profession
distinct from architecture and engineering, urbanism is a shared culture or common ground
between these professions. Planning is rooted in social reformism, giving its practitioners a
happy sense of their own rectitude, urbanism owes more to the pluralism of real urban poli-
tics. Anglo-Saxon planning dominated the postwar years with its new towns and housing
estates, its simple scenario of planners (good) versus speculators (bad), and its technocratic

*Michael Hebbert teaches town planning at the University of Manchester and was formerly at the London
School of Economics and Oxford Brookes. He edits Progress in Planning and is active with the Urban Design
Group, the journal Municipal Engineer and the Ancoats Buildings Preservation Trust. He read history at Merton
College Oxford and came to town planning through a PhD on planners’ use of social science under Sir Peter Hall
in the department of geography at Reading. Gordon Cherry acted as external examiner and subsequent mentor.
Michael Hebbert was a founder member of the Planning History Group and has served on its council through its
successful mutation into IPHS. Alongside a continuing interest in planning history, his research has addressed
the concept of regionalism through studies of decentralization in Spain, European integration and sub-state
government, the erratic course of UK regionalism and the dramas of metropolitan London between 1986 and
2000. In 1998 he was awarded a two-year fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 to
begin a study of urbanism, focusing particularly on the street and the contemporary efforts to retrieve its func-
tion as a liveable public realm.

Planning Perspectives
ISSN 0266-5433 print/ISSN 1466-4518 online © 2006 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/02665430600731153
234 Hebbert

sense of being above politics – attributed in Leonardo Benevolo’s widely read Origini dell’
Urbanistica Moderna to the traumas of 1848 [2]. Writing in 1987, Piccinato observed with
satisfaction that this long hegemony of Anglo-Saxon attitudes had been broken. Its social
reform project was discredited and its elaborate apparatus of paper-based socio-economic
regulation had stalled. The future, in his view, rested with an urbanismo that allowed archi-
tects to take tangible and realizable responsibility for urban space.
This article revisits the distinction between town planning and urbanism. It was originally
given as the Gordon Cherry Memorial lecture at the Eleventh Congress of the International
Planning History Society in July 2004. Urbanismo took centre stage at this conference,
which was held in Barcelona with a 50% participation from Latin countries and with Oriol
Bohigas as one of the keynote speakers. The paper is not intended as a personal assessment
of Cherry or Bohigas and it makes no claims about the significance of their respective contri-
butions. Rather, it uses the careers of two cogent individuals to flesh out Piccinato’s distinc-
tion and set it into a larger narrative of innovation and international diffusion of planning
ideas, in the spirit of Ward [3]. The first section, appropriately for a memorial lecture,
reviews the life and work of Gordon Cherry and considers how it corresponds to Piccinato’s
‘Anglo-Saxon’ type. The second section shows how the postmodern urbanism in mainland
Europe reacted against a procedural and managerial concept of planning, returning to the
mother discipline of design. Architecture being riven by internecine divisions, this approach
was soon implicated in the polarization between traditionalists and modernists, but not in
the case of Oriol Bohigas and the Barcelona model of urbanismo, discussed in section three.
The paper ends by following their influence back to the Anglo-Saxon heartland of town
planning.

The town planner and his profession

The career of Gordon Cherry (1931–96; Fig. 1) personifies the Anglo-Saxon planning tradi-
tion. Entering local government in 1953 with a degree in geography, Cherry was a leading
figure in the fight to establish British town planning as a professional discipline in its own
right, independent and equal to architecture, engineering, surveying or law. One of his earli-
est published papers – ‘The Town Planner and his Profession’ – was a strongly worded chal-
lenge to the academic establishment and the Town Planning Institute to be bolder in defining
and defending the planner’s knowledge base against the superciliousness of older-established
professions [4]. Significantly, Cherry served from 1963–8 as Research Officer in the City
Planning Department of Newcastle upon Tyne under Wilfred Burns, one of the very first
town planners to hold the post of chief officer and head his own department within a city
administration. Cherry described the winning of chief officer positions in Newcastle and
other cities as ‘Battle Honours in the war of attrition … to secure professional recognition’
[5]. It is one of the milestones in his diamond jubilee history of the Royal Town Planning
Institute, a narrative of the profession’s long march from small beginnings in 1914 to the
granting of a Royal Charter in 1970, establishment of university programmes, a membership
of thousands, and general public recognition [6]. Cherry’s characterization of the town plan-
ning profession corresponds fully with Piccinato’s Anglo-Saxon type: it is a branch of
applied social science, rooted in a living tradition of social reform [7].
Town planning versus urbanismo 235

Figure 1. Gordon E. Cherry (by kind permission of the Royal Town Planning Institute).
236 Hebbert

Cherry left Newcastle City Council in 1968 to become Deputy Director of the Centre
Figure 1. Gordon E. Cherry (by kind permission of the Royal Town Planning Institute).

for Urban and Regional Studies (CURS) at the University of Birmingham. Entering
academic life at the age of 37, he enjoyed a short but intensive university career. By the
time of his death, aged only 64, he had authored or co-authored nine books, edited a
further four and (with Tony Sutcliffe) launched both this journal and the Spon book series
‘Studies in History, Planning and Environment’. Above all, he had founded and nurtured
the Planning History Group and transformed it into an International Planning History
Society, an improbable concept brought to life by his own sheer energy and enthusiasm.
Glimpsed on an envelope in the daily pile of post, Gordon’s handwriting was instantly
recognizable – compact, regular, relentless – expressing both the talent for personal friend-
ship by which he nurtured this global network of scholarship, and the qualities of genial
persistence by which he shaped it into institutional permanence. Planning Perspectives is a
fine memorial.
The two sides of Gordon Cherry’s career fit together like an arch. In his writing of plan-
ning history we are always aware of that teleological drive towards independent profes-
sional status within a freestanding policy sector. Planning’s progress is defined in terms of
the movement from a preoccupation with physical layout towards ‘a wider, interpretative
fusion to a concern with social welfare’ [8]. Planning historiography takes a parallel path
from art history to social sciences [9]. The roots of the narrative are Anglo-centric, finding
the reward for Britain’s role in the Industrial Revolution in her pioneership of Garden Cities
and green belts. Cherry helped to articulate a sense of national leadership of a world-wide
movement, a notion which – despite our best efforts to teach a comparative perspective [10]
– British undergraduates still somehow imbibe and regurgitate in the summer examinations:
‘These many events make the proffession of Town Planning want it is today and helps
British Town Planning be amongst the most succsesfull in the world’ [sic] [11].
As a good historian, Cherry was well aware that the planner’s march of progress had not
been altogether straightforward. The subject-definition which he bequeathed to the IPHS
website was ‘planning as a process, with all the quirks of the unexpected en route’ [12].
False hopes and disappointments were a recurring theme in his writing, and he was optimis-
tic neither about the making of place or the shaping of space. He came to regard the city as a
‘tantalizingly indifferent’ mechanism for sustaining social contact or inspiring human aims
and ideals [13].
A long established European idea of urbanism is breaking down. … Form is disintegrating
and the city is vanishing as a central embodiment of collective art and technics. New systems
of communication have exploded the centuries-old association between place and people.
Suburban culture is quite different, and a loose metropolitan form of cities will change the
urban way of life [14].

As a geographer, Gordon Cherry came to the view that the polyform processes of metropol-
itan change are uncontrollable, and planners’ efforts to shape them (Fig. 2) doomed to
disappointment [15]. Perhaps it was this sense of a contemporary impasse that made him
focus his energies so productively on the history of the planning movement. For the present,
he believed that planners should avoid entertaining any vision of the physical form of town
and country and put themselves instead into an enabling role of information-based regula-
tion and management – ‘a technical job framed by social awareness’ [16].
Town planning versus urbanismo 237

Figure 2. ‘Quantitative framework of Structure Plan Area Forecast’. (Source: G. E. Cherry, The
Evolution of British Town Planning, op. cit. [5], p. 199, by kind permission of the Royal Town
Planning Institute.)

It was this explicit, historically informed turn from physical vision to procedure that
Figure 2. ‘Quantitative framework of Structure Plan Area Forecast’. (Source: G. E. Cherry, The Evolution of British Town Planning, op. cit. [5], p. 199, by kind permission of the Royal Town Planning Institute.)

makes Gordon Cherry a valuable exemplar of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Value-based

reformism survived longer in the British context than it did in the USA, but a technical and
procedural conception prevailed in both contexts, underpinned by an entire literature of
planning theory that was more interested in the ‘how’ than the ‘what’, in decision-making
238 Hebbert

than town-making [17]. Planning had become non-Euclidian, a generic type of practice
connecting ‘forms of knowledge with forms of action in the public domain’ [18].

Europe’s street generation

Anglo-Saxon policy and technique exerted a powerful influence in postwar Europe. It

extended right through the diverse spatial planning traditions identified by the European
Commission [19] and the four legal and administrative ‘families’ – British, Napoleonic,
Scandinavian and East European – mapped by Peter Newman and Andrew Thornley [20].
At the high water mark, the Sorbonne’s l’IUUP (Institut d’Urbanisme de l’Université de
Paris) replaced its traditional syllabus of architectural design and urban history with a
curriculum of law, social science and management theory. The Marxist sociologist Henri
Léfèbvre, who taught social theory at the institute, advised his students that their new role-
model was the robot-planner, pulling apart the living tissue of towns and recombining the
pieces into the synthetic commodity-ensembles required by international neo-capitalism. He
interpreted the modernized environments of the Parisian new towns as landscapes of repres-
sion, alienation and submission to the ‘poisonous flower’ of Americanization [21]. This and
similar critiques brought about a lasting paradigm shift in French urbanism, a return to the
urban spaces of street and square with their complexity and richness of memory, and to the
mother-discipline of architecture (Fig. 3) [22]. Nan Ellin’s book Postmodern Urbanism
describes the shift, and the web of connections as activists elsewhere in Europe took to the
streets to defend ‘the street’, and intellectuals rediscovered solidarity in the public realm and
a coherent counter-project to functionalist town planning [23].
The object of this new urbanism, as defined in the seminal work of the Italian architect
Figure 3. Maquettes and typomorphological drawings in Pavilion de l’Arsenal, Paris’ centre for public appreciation of urbanism (source: author’s photograph).

Aldo Rossi, was an ‘architecture of the city’, a gestalt of building and urban space shaped by
time and infused by collective memory [24]. It reoccupied an abandoned terrain, the interme-
diate scale between the global concerns of the economic planner and the architectural build-
ing-as-object [25]. Its defining methodology was analysis of plan-form, first through the
elaborate typomorphological surveys of Saverio Muratori, Gianfranco Caniggia and Carlo
Aymonino, then through a widening repertoire of cadastral study, figure-ground mapping
and spatial typology to which seminal contributions were made by Jean Castex and Philippe
Panerai (Formes Urbaines, 1977) and Robert Krier (Stadtraum in Theorie und Praxis, 1975)
[26]. Searching a postmodern meaning for urbanity and citizenship, its intellectual roots
extended into richer territory than Ebenezer Howard’s late Victorian temperance Utopia: to
the idealism of Henri Bergson [27], to Maurice Halbwachs’ concept of collective memory
[28], and the critical rationalism of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt school [29].
There were parallels (and links) in the American urban design movement, particularly the
morphological explorations of the Cornell school, and Christopher Alexander at Berkeley
[30], but nothing could match the political resonance of urbanism in the old cities of Europe
where, as Henri Léfèbvre had anticipated, struggles over space reconnected the left to the
grassroots of neighbourhood activism. Formative episodes were the battle for La Marolle in
Brussels, the mass squatting along the metro line in Amsterdam, the community-based
renewal of the historic centre of Bologna, and the anti-freeway coalition of squatters,
immigrants and environmentalists who saved the Luisenstadt quarter of Berlin.
Town planning versus urbanismo 239

Figure 3. Maquettes and typomorphological drawings in Pavilion de l’Arsenal, Paris’ centre for
public appreciation of urbanism (source: author’s photograph).

That last episode prompted the international building exhibition IBA-Berlin, a bold
demonstration project with international resonance, the new urbanism’s equivalent of
Letchworth Garden City [31]. Under the non-Anglo-Saxon motto ‘the inner city as a place
to live’, organizers Josef Paul Kleihues and Hardt-Walter Hämer declared a clean break with
postwar traditions of land-use zoning, town planning and highway engineering. Aiming to
‘rebuild the city of streets’, they looked to Franco-Italian morphological methods to put new
life into the historic forms of perimeter street-block and courtyard tenement. IBA combined
contextual design with grassroots community participation in a process known as critical
reconstruction. It involved a hundred architects, a third of them non-German – including
Carlo Aynonimo, Peter Eisenman, Bernard Huet, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe, Alvaro Siza and
James Stirling – and intense publicity both for the initial drawings exhibited at the Milan
Triennale of 1985 [32] and for the real buildings which would soon make Berlin ‘la Mecque
des architectes et gestionnaires de l’urbain’ [33]. There was deliberately wide stylistic varia-
tion amongst the architectural contributions within IBA’s common morphological frame-
work, though it did not stretch as far as the leading Dutch avant-gardist Rem Koolhaas. He
dropped out of IBA-Berlin at an early stage on the grounds that instead of romantically
trying to revive its streets the stagnant (pre-unification) city should be decentralizing into a
picturesque territorial archipelago, ‘a system of architectural islands surrounded by forests
and lakes’ [34] – in other words, just the landscape of anti-urbanism from which most
participants knew they wanted to escape.
240 Hebbert

Rem Koolhaas’ disenchantment with IBA was an ominous symptom of a rift that would
widen as the initial excitements of postmodernism wore off. Contemporary architects were
suspicious of being boxed in by the return to street and block, particularly when computer-
assisted design was offering them such interesting new possibilities of plastic form and
sculptural treatment. As if to confirm these fears, traditionalists such as Léon Krier and
Maurice Culot argued that there was a necessary connection between postmodern urbanism
and a return to pre-industrial craft traditions and the timeless aesthetic of the classical orders
[35]. Private commissions provided the opportunity for large-scale experiments in neo-
traditionalist urbanism. Krier described Seaside, Kentlands, Poundbury, Port Grimaud and
La Heredia as ‘the first concrete demonstrations of a form of modernity that is not alienat-
ing, kitsch or aggressive but serene and urbane’ [36]. As architect of Seaside, he played an
active role in anchoring US New Urbanism to the cause of architectural conservatism. The
context of Europe’s ancient urban settlements gave extra force to arguments about architec-
tural form, collective memory and cultural identity and, when the European Commission
began its long (and ultimately unsuccessful) search for a common policy towards towns and
cities, the anti-modernists claimed it as the basis for a new Charter of Athens, based on an
architecture of streets, squares, small plots, and historic styles [37]. A return to the social
solidarities of urban space became romantically entangled in an architecture of cornice lines
and vertical windows [38].
But partisanship in the battle of the styles was a dangerous diversion. Classical and
vernacular revivalism had merit as a basis for infill schemes in historic towns but the claim
to be ‘a mode of modernity’ was culturally dubious and whiffed of Disney (Fig. 4). Stronger
bonds between architecture and urbanism in a handful of traditionalist academies, such as
San Sebastian, Notre Dâme and Ferrara, could only weaken its appeal to the architectural
mainstream. CNU’s academic impetus was held back by the cultural connotations of neotra-
ditionalism. In the Prince of Wales’ ingenious town-making experiment at Poundbury,
innovative engineering was masked by an architecture of nostalgia. Europe’s most ambitious
urban design experiment, the post-1989 morphological reconstruction of Berlin was
dragged into acrimonious controversy by neohistoricist design requirements. While IBA-
Berlin of 1984–7 demonstrated the scope for architectural diversity within the common
frame of critical reconstruction, the current Planwerk Innenstadt Berlin has, rightly or
wrongly, become associated with a reactionary homage to Schinkel: stone façades, uniform
cornice heights and vertical windows [39].
Javier Monclús reminds us that twenty years ago Oriol Bohigas cited Berlin as the clearest
Figure 4. Neotraditional town square, Bussy St Georges, Marne-la-Vallée (Manolo Nunez-Yanowsky, 1999). Advertised for its convenience to nearby Euro-Disney (source: author’s photograph).

exemplar of the new urbanism: ‘a reconstruction of the centre starting from the absolute
respect for the road and the traditional form of the street’ [40].
With urbanism in Berlin compromised by neohistoricism, the spotlight shifted to a city as
celebrated for its modern architecture as for the restored continuities of its streets, plazas,
boulevards, parks and promenades – Barcelona.

Urbanismo, fisicalismo

Contemporary Barcelona is one of the most potent international exemplars of urban plan-
ning and demonstrates vividly the power of urban emulation [41]. For proper understanding
Town planning versus urbanismo 241

Figure 4. Neotraditional town square, Bussy St Georges, Marne-la-Vallée (Manolo Nunez-

Yanowsky, 1999). Advertised for its convenience to nearby Euro-Disney (source: author’s
photograph).

it has to be read in the context of Spain’s late twentieth century transition to democracy.
Town planning had been an intrusive presence during the last decades of the Franco dicta-
torship. In the opening up of the Spanish economy under the aegis of the World Bank, a
speculative building boom had been facilitated by highways construction and a relaxation of
building controls, regulated weakly by spatial planning – ordenación del territorio. Vehicle
access had come to dictate the suburban morphology of Spanish cities, with free-standing
blocks in a dusty ‘hypertrophy’ of public open space [42]. By the time of the first municipal
elections in 1979 there was widespread public demand for measures to stop the erosion of
urban quarters and sprawl. Out went Anglo-Saxon planning and in came a physical urban-
ism – fisicalismo – bringing the techniques of Italian and French morphology to repair the
public realm, revive the block, reclaim streets and boulevards from obras publicas, and
restore the dignity of urban greenspace [43].
Once European urbanism had taken its morphological turn, Barcelona was bound to be at
the forefront, having one of Europe’s most extraordinary morphological experiments, the
1859 extension plan of Ildefons Cerdà. Cerdà almost invented the word urbanismo – his
neologism was urbanización – and the Eixample still provides a point of departure for
comparative analysis of urban form [44]. Already before Franco’s death, Catalan architects
had been deploying the rigorous morphological techniques of the Italian school in
242 Hebbert

oppositional community-based ‘counterplans’. The counterplan for Poble Nou published by

Manuel de Solà-Morales and colleagues in 1974 was one of Europe’s earliest systematic
exercises in repair of an urban quarter. Solà-Morales recalls the radical impact within Barce-
lona next year, when Philippe Panerai and Jean Castex published the first edition of Formes
Urbains, their powerful study of the ‘agony’ of the European street block [45]. Over the next
three decades Barcelona’s Laboratorio de Urbanismo would be an international centre of
excellence both for its practical assistance to towns and neighbourhoods wrestling with
development pressure, and as the Iberian point of entry for practitioners such as Aldo Rossi,
Carlo Aynomino (IUAV, Venice), Philippe Panerai (Versailles) and Josef-Paul Kleihues (IBA-
Berlin). And, from 1980 onwards, the municipality of Barcelona would give urbanismo the
highest quality of political attention under its three Socialist mayors, Narcis Serra, Paqual
Maragall and Joan Clos.
Appointed head of urbanism in the restored democratic municipality, Oriol Bohigas’ first
reaction was an excoriating attack on town planning. His 1981 paper ‘Barcelona, el urban-
ismo no es posible’ resembled closely the contemporary onslaught on British planners by
Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet minister Michael Heseltine. Both had made successful careers in
commercial publishing and they were similarly unimpressed by the literary outputs of proce-
dural planning – multi-volume development strategies based on consultation and socio-
economic analysis, with phased implementation provisions. For Bohigas such planeamientos
were a ‘sin of pride’ that should be left to despots. They were also a dangerous diversion,
allowing speculators to plunder historic districts and public works engineers to destroy the
public realm in the name of traffic efficiency [46].
In his four years as a city functionary under Mayors Serra and Maragall, Bohigas sought
and got control over the public works department, releasing the municipal technicians from
their technical isolation and making them partners in the sequence of outstanding boulevard
designs and public realm improvements around the city. He brought in the private sector as
a development partner in neighbourhood revitalization. Resources and energy were focused
into 150 localized public realm projects [47]. Though Bohigas’ full-time commitment to the
municipality ended in 1984 the physical momentum of the improvement programme was
brilliantly sustained into the 1990s by his colleague Josep Acebillo, widening its scope from
plazas and parks to streets, housing and transport, in a spirit that Peter Rowe defines as civic
realism – ‘the strong conviction that the city [is] in large part something tangible, objective
and capable of renewal’ [48].
Bohigas, a controversialist, made much of his rejection of the Anglo-Saxon planning
legacy and his ambition to ‘unplan’ (desplanificar) Barcelona. To this day he takes every
opportunity to argue that Barcelona succeeded by abandoning plans in favour of projects
[49]. This somewhat disingenuously overlooks the critical contribution of the Barcelona
Metropolitan Plan of 1976 to the city’s revival [50]. The strategic plan by Joan Antoni
Solans provided the market certainty, the policy framework and the basis for land assembly
that made projects possible [51]. It was because Madrid had no such metropolitan strategy
in place that the Plan General de Madrid of the 1985 – self-styled ‘spearhead of the new
urbanism’ – came down equally firmly in favour of an urbanism of plans rather than
projects [52]. Despite the apparent dichotomy between the rival capitals, their focus on the
form of the city was not dissimilar and had much in common with the leftwing urbanism –
urbanismo de izquierdas – of other Spanish cities [53]. It was what Manual de Solà Morales
Town planning versus urbanismo 243

Figure 5. Baix Vallès, Sant Andrea and Castelldefels: three samples of metropolitan sprawl. (Source:
A. Font, op. cit. [54], p. 79, by kind permission of the author.)

called an urbanismo urbano – a morphological urbanism, respectful of embedded memory,

combining precise initiatives with a global vision, which in Barcelona centred around reinte-
gration of the suburbs and a bold reorientation to the sea, chrystallized in Olympic projects
and their supporting infrastructure [54].
The Barcelona and Madrid teams were open to the same criticism, that their design
achievements left unresolved the wider problems of an unsustainable and apparently uncon-
trollable sprawl [55]. Catalonia’s most urgent spatial planning tasks are clearly on the
metropolitan scale, where the impacts of mass mobility and production flexibility have
created, as Antonio Font Arellano graphically puts it, a discontinuous, paradoxical, disobe-
dient type of space (Fig. 5) [56]. The question is whether street-making is a sentimental
diversion from these tasks, as Rem Koolhaas sees it [57], or rather the essential basis for
consolidation, place-making and the creation of new centralities. The European Union’s
emerging concept of spatial planning seeks solutions to the sprawl in the techniques that
have been developed for the centre [58]. The same idea lies at the heart of the New Urbanist
project for urban America [59]. But what the Congress for New Urbanism does not see is
how to encourage architectural creatives back into the urban canyon.
The importance of socialist Barcelona, with its deep culture of regionalist modernism, is
Figure 5. Baix Vallès, Sant Andrea and Castelldefels: three samples of metropolitan sprawl. (Source: A. Font, op. cit. [54], p. 79, by kind permission of the author.)

its demonstration of dialogue between urbanism and contemporary design [60]. The city has
reinstated the primacy of the street, the square, the park and the public ream without any
compromise to its century-long affair with modernism. The European school of neotradi-
tionalism has never gained a foothold in Barcelona [61]. Again, one should acknowledge the
seminal role of Oriol Bohigas, which extends far beyond his two stints with the municipality
as officer and elected politician. In 1981, the year he took responsibility for urbanism in
Barcelona, his practice MBM had taken first prize in IBA-Berlin for their project for a city
block in Friedrichstadt. One constant throughout his long career, as architectural historian,
commercial practitioner and head of the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura, has been
the desire to reconcile sense of place with modernity. The enigmatic title ‘Grup R’ which he
244 Hebbert

adopted with Josep Martorell in 1951 stood equally for regionalism, for realism and for
rationalism [62]. While staunchly upholding the principle of morphological continuity,
Bohigas has not accepted architectural pastiche – in his words, ‘historical stylised buildings
do not make a historical city’ [63]. Barcelona’s street-based urbanism may be called ‘tradi-
tional’, but it never seeks to annul the formal and typological conquests of the modern
movement. In Bohigas’ own oblique words:
This is surely one of the most interesting challenges of the new urban design. It is not trying
to reorganise urban space with residential typologies borrowed from the Baroque or Neo-
classicism, but to give them enough autonomy and articulation to allow cohabitation with
the constructional formulae already endorsed by the modern movement [64].
Bohigas has continued to wrestle with these challenges. His manifesto Ten Points on an
Urbanistic Methodology calls in equal measure for architecture that innovates and chal-
lenges custom, and urbanism that sustains the shared urban language of street, square, block
and park. One can see the working of that dialectic of received typology and inventive form
in the Nova Icaria Olympic Village (Figs 6–8), master-planned by MBMP, which the Royal
Institute of British Architects singled out in 1999 when, for the first time since 1848, it
awarded the Royal Gold Medal not to an individual but ‘to Barcelona, its government, its
citizens and design professionals of all sorts’ [65].
Figure 8.
6. Vila Olímpica, Barcelona: street
7. initial frontage
aerial perspective
morphological
as built
of the
sketches.
(source:
MBM master
(Source:
author’splan.
photograph).
M. de
(Source:
TorresM.
i Capel,
de Torres
op. cit.
i Capel,
[51], op.
p. 302,
cit. [51],
by kind
p. 302,
permission
by kindofpermission
the Mancomunitat
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de Barcelona.)

Conclusions

Josep Acebillo and Oriol Bohigas travelled to London in 1999 with the three Socialist
mayors to receive the RIBA Gold Medal (Fig. 9). Presenting the five men at the award cere-
mony, Robert Maxwell drew a contrast which echoes our original dichotomy, town plan-
ning versus urbanismo:
City planning is a modern subject, about as old as modern architecture, almost as old as Le
Corbusier’s concept of urbanism. But does this subject really exist ? … City planning was
meant to be a science, but standards change as fast as the practical measures taken, so that
evaluation becomes difficult. Analytical concepts may not last for very long, statistics have
little effect on appearances … Attempts to reshape existing cities like our own Birmingham,
using analytical concepts like motorway box, neighbourhood unit, tower block have not
been very successful. Appearances have been against them … Could it be that city planners
need to be more sensitive to what buildings can do to shape the city and give it meaning?
Because this seems to have been the crucial idea that has resulted in the conspicuous success
of Barcelona [66].
Maxwell went on to acknowledge Aldo Rossi as the inspirational text. Scientific town plan-
Figure 9. RIBA Gold Medal Ceremony 1999 (by kind permission of the Royal Institute of British Architects).

ning had failed. An urbanism based upon Architecture of the City succeeds.
So we come full circle to Giorgio Piccinato and the eclipse of the Anglo-Saxon concept
of planning as ‘process’. The full significance of the Gold Medal became apparent when
Pasquall Maragall came back to London to help launch the report of an Urban Task
Force chaired by the architect Richard Rogers, Towards an Urban Renaissance [67].
Maragall’s radiant optimism about the role of the cities as centres of creativity and
exchange proved infectious for Anglo-Saxons, on whom European civic realism has had a
Town planning versus urbanismo 245

Figure 6. Vila Olímpica, Barcelona: initial morphological sketches. (Source: M. de Torres i Capel, op.
cit. [51], p. 302, by kind permission of the Mancomunitat de Municipis de l’Area Metropolitana de
Barcelona.)

greater impact than American New Urbanism [68]. (Bohigas’ colleague David Mackay
actually gave a paper to the 2005 RIBA Annual Conference with the provocative title
‘Forget the US – the answer lies in the European city’) [69]. CABE, the Commission for
Architecture and the Built Environment (the Blair government’s replacement for the Royal
Fine Art Commission) has worked energetically to create new lines of communication
between architecture and urbanism [70]. At a time of flourishing interest in urban design
[71], all the professions of the built environment began to meet annually to discuss this
common task [72]. In the spirit of the times, Gordon Cherry’s own Royal Town Planning
246 Hebbert

Figure 7. Vila Olímpica, Barcelona: aerial perspective of the MBM master plan. (Source: M. de
Torres i Capel, op. cit. [51], p. 302, by kind permission of the Mancomunitat de Municipis de l’Area
Metropolitana de Barcelona.)

Figure 8. Vila Olímpica, Barcelona: street frontage as built (source: author’s photograph).
Town planning versus urbanismo 247

Figure 9. RIBA Gold Medal Ceremony 1999 (by kind permission of the Royal Institute of British
Architects). From left to right: Josep Acebillo, Joan Clos, Robert Maxwell, Pasqual Maragall, Oriol
Bohigas and Narcis Serra.

Institute redefined its professional mission, giving less emphasis to procedure and process,
and more to fisicalismo – the mediation of space, the making of place. Reducing post-
graduate programmes to just twelve months it tacitly abandoned that historical claim of
equivalent professional standing to the architect and the engineer, encouraging a wider
membership with more porous disciplinary boundaries [73].
Paradoxically, for an article resulting from a memorial lecture, this tale of two paradigms
ends with the triumphant ascendancy of the urbanism represented by Bohigas over the
model of planning to which Gordon Cherry committed his life-work. It may seem strange
homage, but to quote again from his words on the IPHS home page, the history of planning
is a journey with all the quirks of the unexpected en route. Birmingham, though unflatter-
ingly mentioned by Robert Maxwell, was one of the first British cities to redefine itself in
terms of a ‘European city’ ideal [74]. In the World Cities monograph published in 1994,
Gordon Cherry had given cautious approval to the Council’s urban design strategy for the
central area [75]. Had he lived to see it, he would surely have been proud to find his adop-
tive home-town bracketed with Barcelona in a 2004 RIBA study as a city whose effective
and consistent vision for the tissue of blocks, squares and interconnected streets had put it
‘firmly on the world map’ [76].
248 Hebbert

Acknowledgement

This paper is an edited version of the Gordon Cherry Memorial Lecture delivered at the
Eleventh Conference of the International Planning History Society in Barcelona in July
2004. The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Royal Commission for the
Great Exhibition of 1851. Thanks with the usual disclaimers to Luis-Felipe Alonso Teixidor,
Rob Freestone, Ian Goldring, Ramón Lopéz de Lucio, Francisco-Javier Monclús, Roger
Simmonds, and the editor and anonymous reviewers of Planning Perspectives; and to Zoe
Wilkinson (RIBA) and Judy Woollett (RTPI) for assistance with images.

Notes and references

1. G. Piccinato, Las teories del urbanismo; un intento de analisis. Urbana 7 (1987) 9–14.
2. L. Benevolo, The Origins of Modern Town Planning (English translation by Judith Landry).
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3. S. V. Ward, Planning the Twentieth-Century City, the advanced capitalist world. Chichester: John
Wiley and Sons, 2002.
4. G. E. Cherry, The Town Planner and his Profession. Journal of the Town Planning Institute 46
(1962) 128–31.
5. G. E. Cherry, The Evolution of British Town Planning. Leighton Buzzard: Leonard Hill, 1974,
p. 201.
6. See especially the concluding ‘Overview: Planning and the Profession’, ibid., pp. 241–59.
7. He had a powerful sense of this reformist legacy, being as active the Bournville Village Trust
(trustee, chairman 1992–6) as he was in the Royal Town Planning Institute (service on its Council
for a quarter of a century, Presidency 1978–9, Outstanding Service Medal 1995).
8. G. E. Cherry, The Politics of Town Planning. London: Longman, 1982, p. 147.
9. G. E. Cherry (ed.), Pioneers of British Town Planning. London: Architectural Press, 1981, p. 4.
10. S. V. Ward, Planning the Twentieth Century City. Chichester: Wiley, 2002.
11. From a first-year planning undergraduate exam script at a (nameless) British university.
12. Homepage of the IPHS: www.iphs.org
13. G. E. Cherry, Urban Change and Planning. Henley-on-Thames: Foulis, 1972, p. 246.
14. Ibid., p. 249.
15. ‘We still pretend that our planning system is shaping the distributional map of urban Britain,
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16. Ibid., p. 148. See also his ‘Reflections’, pp. 180–90 of Cities and Plans, the shaping of urban
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Town planning versus urbanismo 249

20. P. Newman and A. Thornley, Urban Planning in Europe. London: Routledge, 1996, p. 29.
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250 Hebbert

45. P. Panerai, J. Castex, J. C. Depaule and I. Samuels, op. cit. [25].

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61. F.-J. Monclús, op. cit. [40], p. 404.
62. P. G. Rowe, Civic Realism. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1997. See also, for Gruppo 7, J. Loach,
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City Revisited. London: Spon, 2000, pp. 125-149, particularly p. 132.
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Town planning versus urbanismo 251

Hebbert, El Grupo de Trabajo – Task Force – y el nuevo enfoque del urbanismo británico. Urban
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69. His paper to the RIBA Annual Conference, Bristol, Saturday 2 July 2005 was sandwiched
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70. www.cabe.org.uk.
71. For which, see the activities and journal of the Urban Design Group: www.udg.org.uk.
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76. N. Corbett, Transforming Cities: Revival in the Square. London: RIBA, 2004, pp. 131–54.