Histories of Urban Planning and Political Power

Urban planning has always been a preeminent instrument of political power.In this volume, contributions from Europe and Latin America provide insight into the functions of planning under very different political and societal constellations over the last hundred years: dictatorships, parliamentary democracies, and illiberalism; capitalism and state socialism; state interventionism and neoliberalism; societies in times of peace and societies marked by colonial, civil, world, or cold wars. The dictatorships of the 1920s and 1930s made extensive use of the potential of planning for economic growth, for brutal repression, but also for the integration of certain population groups and as an effective means of propaganda.The legacy of these dictatorships still characterizes many European cities today and confronts planning with complex tasks.Dictatorial state socialism planned to establish a new social order with a particular technocratic rationality, which did not, however, cancel completely