The 1945 plan for the redevelopment of Kingston upon Hull offered a utopian vision of the city's future: clean and healthy neighbourhoods; land use rationally organized to separate homes from industry; and all the amenities a modern citizen could want. As one civic leader claimed, the plan was ‘the only fitting tribute that could be paid to the devotion and courage of a brave people’ fresh from victory in World War II (p. 1). Similar planning documents were developed for towns and cities across Britain. Though not all deployed the same idealistic imagery and language, the compelling rhetoric of post-war ‘urban modernism’, and the often-fantastic images which accompanied it, offered both contemporaries and historians a vision of a ‘New Jerusalem’ which ultimately failed to materialize over the next 20 years. In his first book, James Greenhalgh complicates this story, providing an account of a transitory moment in Britain's urban history which was, quite literally, more than meets the eye.

As Greenhalgh explains, it is important to understand the difference between the visions depicted in the plans and the realities they were proposing. Specifically, this means differentiating between the architectural Modernism depicted in the plans’ illustrations and the more totalizing practice of urban modernism – note the difference in capitalization – they were intended to enact. This argument develops over the course of the book, which can broadly be divided into two parts. In chapters 1 and 2, Greenhalgh focuses on the plans themselves. In the first, he challenges the periodization of urban modernism, showing how the 1940s plans were developed from earlier 1920s and 1930s schemes which were later inflected with discourses of wartime sacrifice to justify their enaction. The plans for Manchester and Hull were each a palimpsest of competing voices, developed over time, which deployed a range of techniques to justify the planners’ and the local authority's right to manage the development of urban space. Seen in this way, the plans were the result of a longer-term effort by the local state to exert its control over the physical environment as part of a larger effort to improve social and environmental conditions. The second chapter examines more closely how local authorities enacted plans to control the physical environment including the division of cities into functional zones, the regulation of advertising and the determination of what colour householders could paint their doors. The enforcement of these controls over the mundane aspects of urban space and everyday life, Greenhalgh argues, is the key to understanding urban modernism, rather than focusing on the architectural Modernist aesthetic with which it is most often linked; the buildings had to look like something.

The second part of the book focuses in more detail on these mundane aspects of urban modernism. In chapter 3, Greenhalgh provides an account of the development of the ‘neighbourhood unit’ as an idealized spatial form; one which would provide amenities and allow for large-scale re-housing while creating communities through the regulation of space. Neighbourhood units were organized in a way that would encourage social interactions between residents, for example in shops. Shopping therefore became part of the local state's attempt to control various aspects of the everyday lives of its citizens, but these planned social interactions began to conflict with people's changing patterns of consumption. The fourth chapter expands on this contention between planners’ intentions and the everyday uses of urban space. Community centres were envisaged as a hub of social interaction and educational improvement, but residents sought to use them in ways that conflicted with this ideal; for example, as spaces for political or religious meetings. The discussion of local Conservatives’ fears surrounding use of community centres for Labour party meetings is a welcome inclusion, demonstrating that urban modernism was not as consensus-driven as it may, at times, appear. Conflict did not simply manifest itself between the planners and the users; as Greenhalgh shows, users also clashed over the use of these spaces in ways which were often generational and gendered. Beyond the community centre, residents contested the local state's attempt to control virtually all aspects of everyday life through the simple act of walking on the grass rather than the footpath, creating ‘desire lines’.

The fall of urban modernism, as Simon Gunn and others have shown, came in the 1970s: the result of its repeated failure to alleviate structural problems, the rise of urban conservation groups and sustained criticism from across the political spectrum of Modernist architecture. However – as Reconstructing Modernity deftly shows – in terms of people's everyday uses of urban space, urban modernism as a totalizing project was already faltering in the 1950s. Such was the importance of urban modernism in this period, the city as an object of analysis has become a critical part of plethora of academic studies of the decades after 1945. Greenhalgh provides an authoritative and engaging account of state power and everyday life in mid-twentieth-century Britain which will undoubtedly shape these new histories as they make their way from the pages of academic journals to a new series of monographs.