Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880, 4th Edition

Preface to the First Edition

Anyone who writes a history of planning should probably start the preface in self-defense: surely planners should plan, not retreat into reminiscence. Simply, I wrote this because I found the subject intriguing. As elsewhere in human affairs, we too often fail to realize that our ideas and actions have been thought and done by others, long ago; we should be conscious of our roots. I rest my plea.

Unfashionably, I had no grant, hence no benefactor to thank; nor an assistant, hence no one to blame but me. And, since I typed it all, I should first thank the anonymous authors of WordStar and WordPerfect; Chuck Peddle for his legendary Sirius I; and the unknown cottage-fabricators of the Taiwanese clone that – following the iron laws of peripheral Fordism – latterly replaced it in my study. Rosa Husain deftly turned the references into footnotes, thereby initiating herself into the pleasures and the terrors of WordPerfect’s macros.

But, as ever, I want to thank the librarians. Those who argue for the law of declining public services, and we are all occasionally goaded into joining them, must never use the great reference libraries of the world. I have been privileged to spend much pleasurable time in three of them while researching this book: the British Library Reference Division (alias the British Museum Reading Room), the British Library of Political and Economic Science (the LSE Library), and the Library of the University of California, Berkeley. ...