ABSTRACT Although Washington D.C. is one of the best known capitals of democracies in the world, this article demonstrates that the representation of republican and democratic values in its architectural and city planning were largely dismissed in its earliest design phase, whereas ancient Roman – usually Imperial – examples were valued instead. The discussion focuses on two aspects: the grandeur of the space and the initial absence of a location for the Supreme Court. The planning process is mainly reconstructed through letters and visual representations describing the earliest plans, focusing on the main characters in the process: Pierre L’Enfant and Thomas Jefferson. L’Enfant is often seen to be advocating for designs based on authoritarian examples, whereas Jefferson is seen to be a flag-bearer for designs that represent more republican values. The article demonstrates, however, that neither man actually considered republican elements to be important for the city-planning or architecture of the new capital; instead, ancient Rome can be seen as a model behind the plan, as Rome ambiguously suggested both Imperial grandeur and republicanism.

ABSTRACT A quest for quality of the (un)built environment is part of most planning cultures. Striving for quality, though, is an ambiguous planning objective, often only operationalized with soft or informal policy instruments, such as guidelines or advisory boards. Adopting a governance arrangements perspective, this study unravels the history of the spatial quality concept in Dutch national spatial planning to develop a deeper understanding of what steers the conceptualization and use of quality concepts. An extensive document and interview-based historical analysis of the discourse, actor(coalition)s, rules of the game and resources related to spatial quality indicated four distinct phases in the quest for spatial quality: (1) the emergence and development of the concept in the 1980s, (2) a period of institutionalization and hegemony, followed by (3) national projects and programmes, and devolution to lower governmental tiers, and (4) a revival of spatial quality in national spatial planning in the 2020s. The analysis illuminated how the four dimensions of governance arrangements contributed, often in conjunction with each other, to the emergence, positioning, and survival of spatial quality in each phase. Furthermore, malleability proved to be a critical characteristic of the spatial concept itself for its continued relevance since the 1980s.

ABSTRACT This paper recounts the history of how Venezuelan expertise in rural regional planning was developed during the 1960s in the context of the Venezuelan agrarian reform. It explains the role that Israeli technical cooperation, which introduced Raanan Weitz’s ideas on rural development through regional planning, played in this process. This reform, promoted by the nascent Venezuelan democracy, aimed to eliminate the latifundia system inherited from the colonial era and redistribute land among poor peasants for economic and social emancipation. Venezuela’s commitment to the reform was significant, and in 1961, it received additional backing from the U.S. government through the Alliance for Progress, a foreign aid programme launched to curb the communist threat in the region. By analyzing the case study of Las Majaguas, a large-scale irrigation scheme designed to resettle 2,200 peasant families, this article will demonstrate how architects and planners, along with many other professionals, helped translate political, geopolitical, and economic objectives into specific forms of regional rural planning and social control. This article therefore offers a critical perspective on the history of the modernization of rural areas in Venezuela and the role played by architects and urban planners in this process.

ABSTRACT This article investigates the renovation plan for the Molo district in Genoa (Italy) designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. The article seeks to highlight how this project was a critical moment in Renzo Piano’s architectural research in Genoa. Although it was never carried out, the plan enabled Piano to experiment and to explore design approaches to architectural and urban renovation through the creation of public spaces. By analysing the evolution of the multiple versions of the plan, the paper also shows a crucial shift in Piano’s focus as it turned from the redevelopment of the urban fabric to the redefinition of the relationship between the city and the sea. This transition laid the foundation for his subsequent work on Genoa’s waterfront and culminated in the Porto Antico plan for the 1992 International Specialized Exposition. Drawing on extensive archival research supported by the Renzo Piano Foundation, this study offers an in-depth examination of the plan’s structure, including of the development of the Service Hub proposal. By offering an in-depth analysis of previously underexplored archival materials, this paper fills a significant gap in existing scholarship and underscores the lasting impact of the Molo plan on Renzo Piano’s work on Genoa’s waterfront.

ABSTRACT The paper focuses on a small emergency housing estate in Stockholm, designed by Erik Gunnar Asplund at a time when Swedish society began to place some importance on housing programmes. After detailing the acute crises experienced in WWI, the paper briefly summarizes the history of the interwar period. In 1917, the Stockholm municipality was forced to act by a programme for 2500 emergency dwellings. One of those projects, notably that of Stativet och Tumstocken area was assigned to Asplund. Despite the economic pressures, he built housing of high architectural quality. The emergency housing programme was a starting point for a growing concern about contemporary housing conditions. In 1917, the ‘Home Exhibition’ in Stockholm showcased reduced-size dwellings at actual scale in search of better alternatives. Asplund's widely acclaimed contribution remains a significant part of Swedish architectural history. Subsequently, the 1930 Stockholm exhibition became a symbolic start for a new housing policy that would be implemented after the WWII. Today Asplund is a world-famous architect known for his great public projects and the 1930 exhibition, but the almost unparalleled project of Stativet och Tumstocken illustrates the strength of his social engagement even in the smallest and most unpretentious buildings.

ABSTRACT The impacts of case law on the conceptual evolution of planning practice are important to the fields of administrative law and town planning in the context of the common law jurisdiction of England & Wales, yet they remain under-examined in the literature of both fields. This paper utilizes historical institutionalist theory to analyse the emergence of distinct planning practices, drawing on relevant legislation and citing case law from 1909–1986. In examining planning’s emergence from the milieu of the law on housing, public health, and administration, broader contexts across the chosen timeline are considered, in terms of the amount of activity seen through annual planning applications and appeals, and in terms of the legal, political, and economic contexts of the period. These layers of context reveal the ways in which planning actors have historically turned to case law to shape the boundaries of administrative power and how the courts, in deciding planning cases, transposed their approach from better established areas of case law, thereby fixing planning practice on new path dependent processes. It is concluded that case law between 1909 and 1986 formed part of the context for, and directly shaped, the evolution of planning practice in the twentieth century.

ABSTRACT Literature on Brasília, Brazil’s capital since 1960, has primarily focused on the architecture and urban design of its political and administrative centre, known as the Pilot Plan, and has often considered its satellite towns to be an undesirable byproduct of the building of the modernist city. This article looks beyond the Pilot Plan to the favela removals that led to the creation of the satellite towns, concentrating on the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. The analysis draws on previously unused and underexplored documents produced by government agencies to show that removal and resettlement schemes were not isolated or makeshift actions, as frequently assumed. Instead, these efforts were meticulously planned and developed into a comprehensive policy to preserve Brasília's original design.

ABSTRACT Abbasabad is one of the largest symbolic political urban projects in contemporary Iran, covering over 5.5 million square metres. Despite its constant political significance since the 1960s and envisioning six exclusive master plans during two regimes, the project faced considerable delays and devastating fragmentation. While all the narratives attribute the unsuccessful history in Abbasabad to macropolitical drawbacks, this study traces the failure by focusing on the emergence of an unseen, non-discursive, and non-human actor. This actor is the highway, which is present throughout Abbasabad and divides the announced official project into several regions, each with its distinct functions and visions. Because the project is ultimately a loss, its history of failure matters more than the official narratives represented in the master plans. Using the Foucauldian genealogical approach and shifting from the notion of politics to relational politics given in ANT, highways emerge as actors with different roles and significant impacts, evolving and interacting unstoppably with Abbasabad. This narrative takes a more grounded perspective, indicating that highways have influenced the master plans, not vice versa. Moreover, politicians had the opportunity to consider such factors; however, macropolitical forces belittled them by pursuing mega-scaled integrated concepts.