Questioning public histories of urban planning: an investigation of 'urbanisme horloger' narratives in the Unesco site of Le Locle/La Chaux-de-Fonds

ABSTRACTThe recent, joint inscription of Le Locle and La Chaux-de-Fonds on the World Heritage List (2009) offers an interesting example of public use of planning history within the context of a heritage-making process. The notion of 'watchmaking town planning' that was coined for the Unesco campaign of these two Swiss cities suggests that a fundamental unity existed between their planned spatial organization in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries and the social organization of their industrial communities. The paper questions this narrative by discussing the interpretation of a specific planning document – the 1835 scheme for La Chaux-de-Fonds drafted by Ponts-et-Chaussees inspector Charles-Henri Junod – that seems to play a central role within the conceptual framework of 'urbanisme horloger'. The analysis aims to suggest that there are both difficult challenges and promising intellectual opportunities to be taken by closely observing the ways in which planning histories are publicly disseminated a..

Playing within De Carlo’s Field

The paper takes the New Villaggio Matteotti in Terni, a housing complex designed by Giancarlo De Carlo in the early 1970s, as an observation point from which to measure some of the competences and tools that architectural historians of late modernism have often mobilized. The analysis of the existing literature on the Villaggio brings to identify at least three recurrent ways of understanding the role of the historian. First, the historian as an intellectual exposing the contradictions behind architectural practice. Second, the historian as a philologist and a specialist in the treatment of dedicated archival sources. Third, the historian as a specialist in the study of architectural forms. The analysis suggests that, at least in this case, historians have firmly situated themselves within definitions and ways of understanding the architectural object that had been initially codified by the designer. This raises questions concerning the capacity of architectural history to contribute to radical changes in the interpretation of the built environment

Commercio e cittadinanza nei quartieri 167 italiani. Alcune note di ricerca

L’articolo riflette sugli immaginari legati al commercio a partire da una ricerca in corso sulla pianificazione e realizzazione dei quartieri PEEP italiani. La legge 167 (1962) e una serie di provvedimenti successivi rappresentarono, nelle intenzioni dei loro promotori, un momento fondativo per la costruzione di una nuova generazione di quartieri a grande scala capaci di generare nuove forme di urbanità. Quale ruolo ebbe il commercio all’interno di un simile processo? Appoggiandosi a un piccolo numero di studi di caso, la ricerca enuncia l’ipotesi che portare il fuoco dell’osservazione sulla questione del commercio permetta di cogliere alcuni dei nodi irrisolti dietro le sperimentazioni del secondo dopoguerra intorno alla “grande dimensione”. A differenza di quanto accaduto in diverse esperienze internazionali del periodo nel campo dell’urban design, le culture architettoniche e urbanistiche italiane faticarono a riconoscere nell’emergente dimensione del consumo di massa il possibile fondamento di nuove forme di socialità e di cittadinanz

Histoires et quartiers. Méthodes, narrations, acteurs

In recent years, the history of neighborhoods has attracted a renewed interest with regard to urban policy investigations and their qualitative objectives, thus experiencing a return to human scale, to proximity, and to the “15-minute city.” A resurgence of historical engagement occurs from various directions and within different domains, such as habitat and housing, neighborhood facilities, employment, mobility, and neighbor relations. These new perspectives question several scales (local, national, transnational, global) by seeing neighborhoods as places where construction practices and spatial representation intersect at different levels. This issue on “Histories and neighborhoods” develops along the lines of two approaches: methodological and epistemological aspects, as well as research strategies (1), and the construction and uses of narratives with actors in specific urban contexts (2). It is interested in the ways in which these questions are addressed in different political contexts and scientific milieux. Over the past ten years, in the fields of urban history, architecture and landscape, and in urban sectors more specifically, we have witnessed attempts at interdisciplinary hybridization between research practices, methodologies and tools that come from different disciplinary backgrounds: archival research, ethnography, history written by public institutions, oral history, and field observations. These methodological dialogues go beyond cleavages between quantitative and qualitative research, subjective or objective observation, micro and macro-history, or architectural typology and uses of space. Indeed, these research approaches make it possible to develop interplays of scale, from the micro to the macro, from a domestic setting to the territory, and from everyday actors to structural, institutional or even political actors. Which research strategies are at work? What types of narratives do they produce? How does opening up to the field of representations and identities of local groups integrate social interactions into the analysis of spatial and structural logics? In addition to interview excerpts, as well as graphic, audible and pictorial documents, what types of materials are used? Finally, to what extent is architectural, urban and landscape research well positioned to develop new forms of methodological hybridization? These approaches also lead to different cross-referencing of research topics, and to multiple definitions of the notion of “neighborhood,” the implications of which are explored in this issue. Neighborhood histories can also be perceived as the result of a negotiation in which historians find themselves coproducing interpretations within the framework of a dialogue with narratives developed on different stages, particularly political ones, and carried out by actors with varied objectives and forms of communication. The issue questions the positioning of research as it faces an abundance of diachronic narratives already layered on neighborhoods, part of which do not circulate in academic literature, but rather through forms of oral or written transmission conveyed by political, administrative, professional, associative, and resident networks, etc. We will also focus on the “demand for history”, from the part of planners and other social groups, and on the need to develop historical accounts capable of addressing the questions about the transformation of space, but also on the risk of producing timeless, fictitious or “presentist” spaces. From this perspective, we can question historical research integrating a participatory research methodology and assembling non-academic forms of narration and representation. This will raise questions relating to the coordination of narratives and memories, the contribution of testimonies to the archive and, more broadly, the layering of narratives. In this framework, and in the face of memorial and heritage groups and their tools, the contribution of the architect, urban planner or landscape architect is approached in the production of a common or consolidated history, or even of history as a common good, simultaneously capable of integrating a plurality of perspectives, even potentially conflicting ones. Without revisiting debates on the notion of neighborhood, already thoroughly addressed in the social sciences, and without seeking to establish a universal definition, the issue questions the way in which historiography takes hold of this notion. As such, the diversity of case studies makes it possible to understand how the historical narrative captures the scales of the “neighborhood” in different contexts

Conservation in the age of gentrification: historic cities from the 1960s

A joint review of three books (Françoise Choay's "Le patrimoine en questions", Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly's "Gentrification" and John Pendlebury's "Conservation in the Age of Consensus") that discusses some recent trends in the study of the history of urban conservatio