ABSTRACT
The lively international exchange that distinguished the emerging city planning movement in the early decades of the twentieth century has long captivated the attention of scholars and professionals. With a touch of envy we read of congresses, exhibitions, and publications that brought specialists together to discuss issues affecting the rapidly expanding cities in the industrial world, as well as the settlements in developing countries. As Anthony Sutcliffe aptly stated, planning became truly an “international movement.”1 In spite of the setbacks that followed the two World Wars, the debate about the city, the metropolis, and urban form has regained some of its former liveliness. The twentieth fin-de-siècle has not matched the intensity of the pioneering period, although the projects, realizations, exhibitions, and debates linked to the Berlin IBA 1984-1987 and the redevelopment of Barcelona for the Olympic Games of 1992 were major events that galvanized discussion around the return to an urbanism of streets and squares. More recent events like the José Luis Sert, Architect of Urban Design symposium (Harvard, 2003), the Urban Design at Fifty symposium (Harvard, 2006), the symposium Civic Art and International Exchanges (Miami Beach, 2002), the symposium Camillo Sitte for the 100 anniversary of Sitte’s death (Vienna, 2003), the Brazilian conference on Camillo Sitte and the Circulation of Ideas on Urban Aesthetics: Europe and Latin America, 1880-1930 (Agudos/Bauru, Brazil, 2004), and the yearly Congress for New Urbanism since 1993 have stimulated the exchange of ideas and personal contacts for which even today’s technology is no substitute.2
