The IPHS conference in Yokohama demonstrates that the history of planning is in rude health. The discipline now includes the histories of planning around the world, and scholars from many different countries are reflecting deeply on their own and each other's experiences. Planners, the institutes they work in, the evolution and transmission of their ideas and of course their application and success or failure are now considered from a multitude of regional and disciplinary perspectives. The vitality of these debates in the twenty-first-century global urban world holds much promise that historical study can contribute to understanding some of the challenges facing contemporary cities.
As is perhaps to be expected from a conference held in Yokohama, many of the presentations focused on East Asia, and it was particularly pleasing that there were some 60 participants from China, a reflection of the strength of the discipline in this still rapidly urbanizing country. Many of these presentations focused on the history of treaty ports across the region, a reflection of how cities have developed because of cross-cultural interactions. Examples included a panel on parks in East Asia, two panels that explored the impact of western ideas and colonialism in cities across the region, and the importance of port cities as nodes of cross-cultural exchange. A pair of panels considered how oil has shaped the development of individual cities such as Daqing in north China, and structured connections between cities from Malaysia to Iran. Outside Asia, many of the panels had a trans-regional or comparative focus. Several papers reflected on the importance of socialist planning and its legacy in eastern Europe and the former USSR. One panel reflected on how European countries such as Finland and the UK benefited from ideas of socialist planning in addition to contributing to them. Another debated the extent to which socialist planning in eastern Europe has proved resilient in the face of new challenges since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Resilience was a theme of many papers, hardly surprising given the ways in which planning can help humanity adapt to changing circumstances, such as climate change. One panel drew attention to the importance of the community response to the 2011 earthquake in cities across Japan, while other papers focused on disaster response in Italy and elsewhere. One panel explored the risk that flooding poses to cities, and two papers looked at how cities in Australia are incorporating climate change modelling into their planning. Many of these papers explored the importance of path dependency, which was a major theme of the conference. Delegates were interested in the extent to which the path of historical development is set in a world in which planning ideas have moved freely across borders. Discussions centred on how developmental trajectories may be determined within countries, such as third front cities in western China, and within regions subjected to specific planning ideas and practices, such as the socialist world as a whole. Of course, cities or parts of cities can be transformed by unexpected developments or new initiatives. An example of this is mega-events such as World Expos or the Olympics, which require years of planning, and can have a major impact on a city's infrastructure, housing and public services. A pair of panels considered these in London, Rio and Tokyo, drawing comparisons on how these events led to infrastructure developments, and created winners and losers in the process of planning and construction.
The conference concluded with the Gordon E. Cherry Memorial Lecture, which was given by the president of IPHS, Dirk Schubert, who made a strong case for the value of planning in the past, present and future, despite its failures. In doing so, he argued that the study of planning history is essential for practitioners, and that it may lead to the design of cities that provide a better quality of life for all their inhabitants.
Particularly innovative at this year's IPHS conference was the role of the Global Urban History Project (GUHP), a recently established network that now has over 300 scholars working on multiple aspects of global history. GUHP sponsored 12 panels at the IPHS conference, which were all organized by members of the network. It provided financial support to Ph.D. students and early career scholars, and recorded videos of many of the participants in the conference, who described their work briefly. GUHP's activities at this conference are the first in a series of events over the next few years. Interested readers are encouraged to sign up to the network here: http://globalurbanhistory.org/.
