Ideas of planning came of age in the inter-war period, boosted by the needs and lessons of total war and promoted by new forms of politics on both left and right. This valuable volume, featuring a diverse array of actors and exemplars across Europe (and including what was, in effect, the European transplant of Zionist Israel), provides a valuable guide to that range. If a single notion encompasses the very varied proposals discussed, it is decentralization envisaged as a necessary corrective to the rapid and unplanned urbanization of the nineteenth century. But this dissolution of the city was visualized in very different forms – from the bucolic, in some ways conservative, Garden City ideal of Ebenezer Howard to the radical ‘linear city’ proposed by Bauhaus architect Hannes Meyer. So while, for the editors, politics is very reasonably the context but not the focus of their volume, a political perspective offers an interesting means by which to assess the ideas discussed and the practice which (sometimes) followed.

At the far left stood Czech artist and critic Karel Teige for whom the role of the architect was nothing less than to ‘design utopia’. For Teige, this meant an end to the bourgeois family unit and the rise of collective housing constructed as minimal dwellings with shared amenities. Ironically, as Alena Kubova-Gauché’s account reveals, Teige's one-room homes were adopted by the liberal democratic Czechoslovak state and – lacking the collective services he had envisaged – rapidly became housing of last resort. Hannes Meyer emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1930 at a time when collectivist and anti-urbanist ideas still seemed in vogue. One year later, Stalin's regime turned sharply to an explicit embrace of classical urban and architectural forms and the traditional family. Meyer was able to adapt his ideas before returning west in 1937. Teige died in 1951 in a newly Communist Czech state which had labelled him a ‘Trotskyite degenerate’.

In Welwyn Garden City, Frederic Osborn, Howard's successor as leader of the Garden City movement, proclaimed a social democratic vision of class harmony and mixing. Mark Clapson shows how far reality fell short of this ideal in the socially divided town which emerged. The late Koos Bosma's chapter on the Netherlands is another reminder of the contradictory politics at play in town planning theory and practice. The Bata company town of Zlin incorporated much of the thinking behind the French architect Tony Garnier's earlier template of a socialist Cité Industrielle, but clearly to very different, corporate ends. The state-sponsored settlement of the newly reclaimed Wieringermeerpolder likewise embraced a rational modernity – albeit agrarian rather than industrial – but one based in forms which honoured traditional ruralism. Planning in Poland emphasizes again how progressive ideals could serve a conservative agenda. Both the new port of Gdynia and the industrial new town of Stalowa Wola were judged economically vital to the viability of a newly re-established Polish state by an increasingly authoritarian government. As such, as Piotr Marciniak concludes, the new settlements were symbols of both modernity and a ‘practical patriotism’.

In another newly independent state, Finland, briefly but powerfully divided by civil war in 1918, Otto-Iivari Meurman's design for the new township of Riihimäki combined the harmonious ideals of a comprehensively and classically designed townscape with improved workers’ housing – a combination deliberately intended to promote, in Ulla Salmella's account, ‘national integration and social stability’. The Greater Plan for the Helsinki region, which emerged in 1918, drew heavily on Eliel Saarinen's ideas of ‘organic decentralization’ and, though it remained initially a textbook exercise, would be influential after World War II. Similarly, for obvious reasons, planning debates among inter-war Zionist settlers in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine bore fruit only after the war with the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. Garden City ideals featured powerfully in the vision of both Eliezer Brutzkus and Ariel Kahane but each proposed an urban future which challenged the agrarian collectivism that had originally shaped Zionist thinking. Kahane's championing of neighbourhood units, adopted initially from the US, takes us neatly to that post-war period.

The editors’ introduction asks whether inter-war new towns created ‘a planned society where visions met realities, aided by the design of new urban forms’. A careful reading of this informative and wide-ranging book will allow you to form your own judgement but, to me, it is striking both how varied those visions were and how tempered by practice. A follow-up volume might reveal how far inter-war radicalism was incorporated into a machinery of planning now deemed normal.