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-standing environmental problems through the culverting of the heavily polluted and flood-prone River Blackstaff. The construction of Royal Avenue was the single most important work of urban redevelopment prior to the giant motorway schemes of the 1960s and after. As with the development forty years earlier of Victoria Street and Corporation Street, the scheme was presented as combining slum clearance and more efficient traffic management. Hercules Street, continuing the line of Donegall Place but thanks to projecting buildings connected to it only by a narrow
from the Stade de France, at least in the years before the infamous ‘compensation clause’ in the contract between the state and the consortium was eliminated in 2013.4 210 210 The stadium century Outside of Paris, other stadia have been equally front and centre as part of discussions about urban redevelopment and commercial sporting spectacle. The 2016 European Championship, which featured matches in nine cities in France, triggered the construction of four new stadia and renovations to several others. In Lyon, the powerful owner of the professional football club
schemes were part of a learning process that had profound and lasting effects for the project of urban renewal in the decades that followed. Notes 1 Phil Jones, ‘Historical continuity and post-1945 urban redevelopment: the example of Lee Bank, Birmingham, UK’, Planning Perspectives, 19:4 (2004), 365–89. 2 Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge, ‘Mapping the imagined future: the roles of visual representation in the 1945 City of Manchester Plan’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 89:1 (2012), 247–76. 200 Reconstructing modernity 3 Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post
Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism as moderate and humanist, shedding new light on the importance of the immediate post-war for the trajectory of urban renewal in the twentieth century. The book shows how local corporations and town planners in Manchester and Hull attempted to create order and functionality through the remaking of their decrepit Victorian cities. It looks at the motivations of national and local governments in the post-war rebuilding process and explores why and how they attempted the schemes they did. What emerges is a picture of local corporations, planners and city engineers as radical reshapers of the urban environment, not through the production of grand examples of architectural modernism, but in mundane attempts to zone cities, produce greener housing estates, control advertising or regulate air quality. Their ambition to control and shape the space of their cities was an attempt to produce urban environments that might be both more orderly and functional, but also held the potential to shape society.
superficial resemblance to many of the discussions that had preceded it, beginning in the 1920s. But the convoluted process that led to the selection of Saint-Denis 192 192 The stadium century also represented a significant departure from those earlier debates and reflected the changes that had followed the completion of the Parc des Princes in 1972. Most critically, stadia were now seen by almost everyone in a new light: they were not simply perceived as prestige building projects, like the Parc, but potential motors of urban redevelopment and economic growth. The new
planning historians Peter Larkham and Keith Lilley list over 230 different Plans for post-war British towns and cities – see: Peter J. Larkham and Keith Lilley, Planning the ‘City of Tomorrow’: British Reconstruction Planning, 1939–1952: An Annotated Bibliography (Pickering, 2001). There were interwar planning schemes of some scope and ambition too. See: Charlotte Wildman, Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918–1939 (London, 2016); Manchester and District Joint Town Planning Advisory Committee, Report Upon the Regional Scheme (Manchester
of slum clearance and urban redevelopment, informed members of NAREB in January 1950 that there existed ‘maximum opportunity for private enterprise to engage in the development or redevelopment’ of slums and that those who took up this ‘unprecedented opportunity’ would be able to write off some of the costs accrued, thus making it ‘generally competitive’ to buy ‘hitherto unavailable land’ in slum redevelopment areas. According to Keith, there was a ‘wide range of potential redevelopment activity for private
medieval streets. Writing on London in 1872, Taine expressed the common idea that ‘certainly Napoleon III demolished and rebuilt Paris only because he had lived in London …’. 8 While the political absolutism of the urban redevelopment strategy was clearly at odds with English ways of shaping the cityscape, specific elements of the new Paris made direct reference to admired features of London. Although attempts to create Parisian docks on a scale at all comparable with London’s were predictably unsuccessful they were
inter-war England’, Twentieth Century British History, 15:2 (2004), 119–42; Wildman, Urban Redevelopment, pp. 131–8. 106 William Clark and Gerard Rushton, ‘Models of intra-urban consumer behaviour and their implications for central place theory’, Economic Geography, 46:3 (1970), 486–97; R.A. Day, ‘Consumer shopping behaviour in a planned urban environment’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 64:2 (1973), 77–85. The city and the suburban village 155 107 Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York, 1991); Michelle S. Lowe, ‘Britain
For Simon Gunn and Robert Morris, 1914 marked a turning point in the decline of civic power, as by the 1920s and 1930s towns were ‘abandoned’ by the elites who were responsible for the powerful municipal culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. 17 However, as Charlotte Wildman has demonstrated in her study of urban redevelopment in interwar Manchester and Liverpool, where local elites continued to drive the redevelopment of the cities, cultures of civic pride reflected the specific context of the