Exploring architectural history through the Petroleumscapes of the Randstad to imagine new fossil-free futures

Architectural history in the 21st century is expanding beyond its traditional focus on specific styles, materials, or building typologies and on famous architects, iconic movements, or paradigmatic cities. Following other historical fields that have embraced more complex approaches and adopted new analytical frameworks, architectural historians are exploring themes such as human relations, transnational networks, and cross-cultural exchanges. While changing their disciplinary scope, they are also finding novel ways to engage contemporary discussions – such as the ones held in Paris in December 2015 as part of COP21 on climate change, rising sea-levels, and sustainable energy futures beyond oil. In order to understand this complex present and to meaningfully imagine new futures, they can critically explore histories of iconography, symbolism, and imaginaries of select architecture and vernacular built form, analyzing their social, cultural, economic and aesthetic values.ArchitectureArchitecture and The Built Environmen

Scales and Perspectives of Resilience: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Tange’s Peace Memorial

Resilience can mean a range of things, including the ability of a city or a community to recover quickly both physically and socially, through tangible and intangible elements, physical structures, and people. Built environment scholars have picked up on the concept of resilience in recent years, interpreting it in multiple ways and creating a broad range of narratives. These narratives need to be explored critically, considering who wrote them at what time for what audience and with what narrative goals. This article explores how various actors—from architects to film makers, from historians to politicians and planners —have consciously proposed a range narratives of resilience through their depictions of post World War II Hiroshima. It first briefly reflects on the meaning of resilience. It then builds upon earlier examinations of the destruction of Hiroshima and the construction of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the Peace Memorial Museum by the Japanese architect Tange Kenzō to explore how different actors conceived of resilience, for whom and from which perspective they have built narratives. In the second section, the article explores how Tange and his team managed to bring their project to realization. It suggests that administrators, architects and urbanists, have used rebuilding visions and detailed reports to create resilience narratives aimed respectively at global and local audiences. Overall, the text demonstrates that together, disaster and rebuilding, their representation in the urban environment are all part of larger societal constructions of historical identity.History & Complexit

Mapping transnational planning history in port city regions - London, Rotterdam, Hamburg

Port city territories are nodes in the global transfer of goods, people, and ideas. Their planning is controlled by diverse actors of multiple sizes and by port authorities, municipalities, provinces, and often by large corporations. As such, port city territories are unique places to study transnational urbanism. The creation of water and shipping-related infrastructures, of ports, quays, and warehouses, set the foundation for contemporary and future developments. Planning decisions made in the 19th century established path dependencies that continue to influence planning for ports and cities today. Understanding who has access to water provides insight into territorial justice. Historical geospatial mapping provides an excellent tool for the effective comparison of global processes of shipping and access. Using the lens of cities of the North Sea—specifically London, Hamburg and Rotterdam—the chapter explores how planning has engaged with and responded to both local needs and global challenges. A systematic analysis of the planning history of diverse port cities offers insight into the impact of globalization.History & Complexit

Rising Seas, Changing Coastlines, Safety Threats and the Need for Ecosystem Planning on the Sea-Land Continuum

Diverse actors have built port city regions at the edge of land and water, often over many centuries. Through their collaboration they have helped develop creative solutions to problems faced by port cities in the past. Their patterns of engagement have led to paradigms that can promote or hinder transitions. Identifying these paradigms and developing new ones for the ports of the future requires an understanding of culture.Contemporary challenges of climate change and sea-level rise, but also of new technologies or new logistics demand new approaches, especially those that consider institutional, social and cultural factors.As globalization has facilitated global flows of goods and people, it has bypassed the question of its impact on the territories and localities hosting these flows. An ecosystem approach is needed that recognizes the impact of people on and in space and the cultural mindsets that have evolved over time and that influence the present and the future.The six articles in this special issue provide theoretical and methodological insights. They speak to the importance of collaboration along the sea-land continuum and the need for inclusive and design-based approaches that include a cultural dimension at all scales.History & Complexit

What’s in a cover image?: How to depict planning history

A book’s cover is frequently the first visual element of a book that a reader encounters in a library, bookshop, or—most likely now—on the Internet. Combining the publisher’s usually predetermined logo, typography and layout with an image provided by the volume editor or author, the cover aims to convey multiple meanings. These meanings are particularly important in a field such as planning history, where visuals of the associated disciplines play an important role. Spatial planning and urban design convey multi-faceted ideas through masterplans that are often illustrated with memorable images. Planning history explores these images as part of its approach and needs to pay attention to the ways in which images convey meaning. Taking the example of the selection of the cover image for the Routledge Handbook of Planning History, the article presents how five different types of images addressed specific approaches of the handbook by showcasing cross-cultural exchange, identifying key words and terms of planning history, and using comic strips, games or art work as a means of translating the multiple themes of the book. This short reflective analysis concludes by asking for more investigation of the role of images as part of the changing role of planning in society and the built environment.History & Complexit

Beyond Oil: Designing the Transition

Earth has experienced a number of major energy transitions, each resulting in extensive systemic changes. The introduction of fire in the Paleolithic, the emergence of farming in the Neolithic, and later the industrial Revolution all changed the ways that humans lived, worked, and travelled and the materials they used.History & Complexit

Space, Time, and Oil: The Global Petroleumscape

In addition to explaining the context in which this book emerged, Carola Hein introduces the concept of the petroleumscape, a layered physical and social landscape that reinforces itself over time through human action. The petroleumscape includes different types of interconnected spaces—industrial, administrative, retail, and infrastructural—that are usually considered separately. Hein makes clear why this volume’s case studies pay careful attention to what has been highlighted, downplayed, and hidden as corporate, state, and other relevant actors have attempted to shape perceptions of petroleum and the landscape of which it is a part. Hein also outlines five key stages in the petroleumscape’s development, beginning with the innovations in obtaining petroleum that took place in Pennsylvania in 1859, when petroleum served primarily as a source of lighting fluid, and ending with recent attempts to overcome petroleum dependence.History & Complexit

Idioms of Japanese Planning Historiography

In this chapter, the authors highlight three important strands of interpretation in Japanese planning history—one studying planning as a part of a general urban or architectural history, one focusing on planning as a discipline, and another emphasizing urban design. These strands of history writing speak to the difficulties of studying a country with a very different language, plus a long-standing and original culture. The authors aim to position the planning history writing on Japan in the context of global networks of planning historiography. Exploring the planning history writing inside and outside of Japan, they see different idioms that are related to specific interpretations, terminologies, and representations or perceptions of planning, but also to the use of planning primary materials, written and in imagery. The different perceptions of the role of planning are embedded in, and effectively partly result from, different idioms, both in words and visualizations.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.History & Complexit

The Global Petroleumscape and its Impacts on Design Practice

Over the last century the petroleum industry’s rapid growth has been accompanied by a steady flow of aggressively promoted petroleum-based products. The petroleumscape’s spatial expansion and visual representation achieved widespread citizen buy-in. Following World War II the use of plastic materials in the building industry significantly increased through efforts from architects and industry leaders. The House of the Future, built by MIT architects, the Monsanto Chemical Company, and Disneyland exemplified a modern lifestyle: clean, functional, and fun. The architectural and technocratic dream of a mass-produced, fully plastic house that seemed possible in the post-war years did not survive the subsequent commercialisation of the plastics industry in the 1960s and 70s.History & Complexit

Tatami

Use of the tatami mat reportedly goes back to the 8th century (the Nara period in Japan) when single mats began to be used as beds, or brought out for a high-ranking person to sit on. Over centuries it became a platform that has hosted all facets of life for generations of Japanese. From palaces to houses, from temples to spaces for martial art, the tatami has served as support element for life. Used as an integrated floor element, it is a multifunctional platform for many daily practices: from sleeping to eating, from leisure to work. A tatami mat is a space to sleep. Rolling out a futon mat turns a room into a bedroom. Bringing out a smaller zabuton cushion to sit on and a folding table makes the same space a dining room.OLD History of Architecture & Urban Plannin