Planning beyond borders. An emerging discipline at the international townplanning conference on 1924

Abstract

In the summer of 1924 close to 500 people from 28 different countries visited Amsterdam in order to into immerse themselves in the town planning challenges of their day. Dividing lines separating national developments were transcended in substantive discussions about an emerging discipline. At that time, urbanization was generally perceived as a rapid, autonomous and disastrous process that resulted in unmanageable metropolises with a rapidly declining quality of life. During the conference, special attention was paid to ideas on regional planning: plans that spanned municipal and provincial borders and called for an interdisciplinary approach. This article focuses on the content of the debate on 3 and 4 July 1924. The papers, or ‘preliminary reports’, that preceded the conference have received a fair amount of attention, but it is the substance and atmosphere of the discussions themselves that reveal the openness and collegiality of the international exchange of knowledge. The conference in Amsterdam was no isolated event: an international urban movement, or ‘Urban Internationale’, had been developing in the background since 1910. Various Dutch and foreign organizations were part of a broad international network engaged with the issue of urbanization. Many well-known foreign experts attended the 1924 conference; as such it could be seen as a point of intersection in the multi-dimensional network. The debate covered such topics as housing, traffic problems, conflicting interests, land policy and public green space inside and outside the city. The main topic in 1924 was the possibility of tackling urbanization and ecological issues across administrative and disciplinary borders. At the time, regional planning was a relatively new concept in the Netherlands; the inspiration for such plans came primarily from England, Germany, France, Belgium and the United States. A second and even bigger conference in Amsterdam took place in 1938: the International Geographical Congress, with some 1200 participants from 36 countries. Participants in the relatively small Landscape section of this congress considered to what extent the resolutions of 1924 were reflected in Dutch practice. It transpired that in the intervening years many regional plans had been drawn up and the evaluation of interdisciplinary practical experiences had highlighted numerous difficulties that were still topical. The 1924 town planning conference appears to have been a unique occasion during which multiple urban movements collaborated and in so doing reached a broad audience of town planners, architects, engineers and above all (Dutch) administrators. The involvement of the last group led to a pre-war upsurge in regional plans. As far as the Netherlands was concerned, the 1924 conference can be regarded as the starting point of the rich tradition of regional planning, and perhaps even as the germ of post-war spatial national planning.