Designing the Urban Age — the working title under which Tom Avermaete and Janina Gosseye have constructed a definitive history of urban design — maps a century of architectural and planning responses to the pressures of mass urbanisation, war, decolonisation, and ecological crisis.
About This Book
From the early decades of the twentieth century, as cities swelled and the built environment strained to accommodate unprecedented population growth, architects and planners were forced to rethink housing, public space, and the very structure of urban life. This volume traces that reckoning across a century of upheaval — two world wars, decolonisation, economic crises, and the gathering emergency of climate change. Avermaete and Gosseye bring scholarly rigour to a field that has too often been told through monuments and heroes; their history of urban design is instead attentive to societal forces, political contingency, and the unresolved tensions that continue to shape how cities are made.
Key Features
- 400 pages of historical analysis, urban design case studies, and critical survey of twentieth-century planning thought
- Authored by Tom Avermaete and Janina Gosseye, associate professors of architecture at TU Delft
- Published by Gta Verlag
What You'll Discover
- How architects and planners responded to the specific pressures of reconstruction after two world wars, and what those responses reveal about the discipline's assumptions
- The relationship between decolonisation and urban design — how political transformation reshaped the production of cities across the twentieth century
- The ways economic and political crises have repeatedly forced a reassessment of planning ideologies and housing typologies
- How contemporary challenges — climatic urgency, cultural shift, and the unprecedented density of today's cities — are rooted in a century of contested urban decisions
About the Author
Tom Avermaete and Janina Gosseye are associate professors of architecture at TU Delft. Their collaboration on this volume represents a sustained scholarly engagement with the history and theory of urban design across the twentieth century.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 400
- Dimensions: 200 x 260 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783856764180
- Publisher: Gta Verlag
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architecture historians, urban designers, and planners seeking a scholarly account of how twentieth-century cities were shaped; academics and postgraduate students in architecture, urban studies, and planning theory.