Crossing Boundaries: The Global Exchange of Planning Ideas. Carola Hein, Delft

Private and public institutional frameworks and migratory movements—commodity flows and diverse migratory movements—have long provided a framework for the transmission of ideas of urban form and function and for the transformation of urban and rural spaces around the world. Economic, cultural or social networks promoted the transmission of common forms and practices, some of it unplanned, some of it expressed in varying degrees of comprehensive (urban) planning. Studies on transnationalism and on transnational urbanism have engaged these migrations and their political, economic impact on diverse regions of the world, including the largely unplanned changes they produced in built and urban form. Planning historians meanwhile have explored numerous case studies of transmission of planning ideas across multiple boundaries, exploring diverse instances of imposition and borrowing.

Carola Hein suggests that many discussions of transnational urbanism neglect the role that professional planners have, whereas planning historians fail to engage with the larger frameworks in which urban ideas and plans travel. The two explorations merit an interconnected analysis taking into account not only the scale of the city, but also that of the single building, and this paper provides some examples for such a study. Following a brief examination of the terminology attached to border-crossings as related to urban form and function, this talk explores select case studies in planning history, using Hein’s personal research to illustrate larger questions. Text: Carola Hein

Carola Hein
is Professor and Head, Chair History of Architecture and Urban Planning at TU Delft. She has published widely on topics in contemporary and historical architectural and urban planning – notably in Europe and Japan. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue research on The Global Architecture of Oil and an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship to investigate large-scale urban transformation in Hamburg in international context between 1842 and 2008. Her current research interests include transmission of architectural and urban ideas along international networks, focusing specifically on port cities and the global architecture of oil.

Kuratierung und Moderation: Elise Feiersinger, ÖGFA