Arts & Photography, France, Germany, Historiography 

This is a history of the ideas, events and personalities that shaped the cities of the world during the twentieth century. Peter Hall shows the benevolent influence of the anarchist ideals of Reclus and Kropotkin in the work of Howard, Geddes and Lloyd Wright, which found expression in garden cities and community planning. He contrasts this with the totalitarian vision of Le Corbusier which, spurned by Mussolini and Stalin, was enthusiastically taken up by countless city authorities in Europe and America. He explores the nightmare cities of Brasilia and Chandigarh and seeks the origins of the high-rise slums and vandalized spaces that afflict the lives of so many people. Planners have become the handmaidens of business, architects the designers of spectacle: both have retreated from any active interest in real, social achievement. Meanwhile the threat to civilized life represented on the one hand by the despair and resentment of the urban underclass and on the other by uncontrolled demolition and development, remains as real and as intractable as ever. Peter Hall is author of over 20 books on planning and related subjects including "London 2000", "The World Cities" "Great Planning Disasters" and "High Tech America". He has been credited with the invention of the "urban enterprise zone" concept. He is widely known throughout the west for his contributions both to the practice and to the theory of city and regional planning. - from Amzon