ancient cities

See also Dickens, Charles; Flâneur; Social Production of
Space; Urban Culture; Urban Life
Further Readings
Ball, John Clement. 2004. Imagining London:
Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis.
Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Barta, Peter. 1996. Bely, Joyce, and Döblin: Peripatetics in
the City Novel. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Brooker, Peter. 1996. New York Fictions: Modernity,
Postmodernism, the New Modern. London: Longman.
———. 2002. Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film
and Urban Formations. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.
Donald, Bernard. 1999. Imagining the Modern City.
London: Athlone.
Douglas, Ann. 1995. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel
Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. 1994. Paris as Revolution:
Writing the 19th-century City. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Highmore, Ben. 2005. Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in
the Material and Symbolic City. Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Lehan, Richard. 1998. The City in Literature: An
Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Pike, Burton. 1981. The Image of the City in Modern
Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Resina, Joan Ramon and Dieter Ingenschay, eds. 2003.
After-images of the City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Rotella, Carlo. 1998. October Cities: The Redevelopment
of Urban Literature. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Willett, Ralph. 1996. The Naked City: Urban Crime
Fiction in the USA. Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press.
Wirth-Nesher, Hanah. 1996. City Codes: Reading the
Modern Urban Novel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Zhang, Yingjin. 1996. The City in Modern Chinese
Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time,
and Gender. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Ur b a n pl a n n i n g
Urban planning has become a difficult discipline
to define precisely because of its eclecticism, which
Urban Planning
903
itself is a result of different levels and conceptions
of urban planning that have developed over the
last half-century. Even the prefix “urban” (or
“urban and rural”) is one of several that have
been employed to describe this activity. Thus, 50
years ago, the term town and country planning
would have been more common, although even
then the term city planning, or city and regional
planning, was preferred in the United States and
some other countries. Sometimes the term landuse
planning (or land-use and transportation planning)
has been used to describe the same activity,
as has the term environmental planning or, more
recently, spatial planning. In contrast to many
other, better-established disciplines, this proliferation
of terms to describe the discipline of urban
planning is symptomatic of a certain lack of focus,
or agreement, as to what exactly this discipline is
about. A helpful way of getting a grip on the
nature of urban planning is therefore to recount
the different conceptions of it that have developed
over the past half-century.
Urban Planning as Urban Design
Some 50 years ago, urban planning—or “town”
planning as it was then more usually called—was
seen largely in physical terms, that is, in terms of
the layout and design of urban form—its buildings
and other physical structures, and its spaces,
including roads and other lines of communication.
To be sure, urban planners of this time acknowledged
that the buildings and spaces of urban areas
were themselves centers of activities in urban areas
and thus of different kinds of land uses and the
interconnections between them; hence the occasional
use of the term urban land-use planning.
Yet, in spite of this, the overwhelming emphasis
was on the physical layout and design of urban
areas. Urban planning was thus virtually synonymous
with urban design, and the making of “master
plans” showing the disposition of main land
uses and the layout of built form was the main
instrument of urban planning and therefore the
main focus of an urban planner’s training. Given
this emphasis on physical planning and urban
design, the people who seemed most qualified to
undertake urban planning at this time were assumed
to be architects, or civil engineers, for they were
already trained in the design of the artifacts of the