A Fit Country? The Impact of 'the Great War' on Town and Country Planning

摘要

It is frequently claimed that the discipline of town and country planning emerged in the wake of "the War": But the question, of course, is which war? The answer most generally given is the Second World War. After all, those war years produced the Barlow, Scott and Uthwatt commissions and in its aftermath came the Reith Report and Patrick Abercrombie's development of the Greater London Plan for the reconstruction of London, which envisaged moving 1.5 million people from London to new and expanded towns. All these efforts resulted in the New Towns Act 1946 and the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. But this was not the beginning of town planning. Indeed, two and a half millennia previously the Persian Wars had devastated Miletus, providing the impetus for Hippodamus, styled the inventor of town planning by no lesser authority than Aristotle, first to deploy his eponymous grid plan. Planning and war, it would seem, have a long and intimate relationship.