ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies some key texts that mark advances in the writing of planning history and predominantly for an English-speaking readership. The emergence of modern planning in the English-speaking world is usually dated to the early 1900s as an integration of diverse reform agendas catalyzed by the many urban challenges posed by the impacts of industrialization. The great English-language attempt to construct a global planning history was by Stephen Ward. This represents a high point in capitalizing on modern planning history scholarship to survey the development of urban planning and its spatial impacts. Its focus is the advanced capitalist world covered in a quasi-encyclopaedic mode in four big time blocks: from the "emergence" of planning in the early 20th century to the late 1930s; the war and postwar years; the 1960s–1970s; and the 1980s–1990s to the turn of the 21st century.
