ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an overview of how urban planning was addressed in the different histories of the city produced during the twentieth century. Neither recovering ‘the stories of urbanism’ that are a sort of professional self justification, nor limiting it to a critical view of these records, the text redeems the potentials of both as necessary inputs for the elaboration of urban history, thanks to its ability to cope with much of the logics that rule the forms of thinking over, and intervening in, the city. Beginning with a selection of local writings, one can distinguish the problems and – chronologically – the ‘urban evolution’ of generic urban planning as well as its further overshadowing by urban sociology and ‘bottom-up’ history, and its recent recovery by cultural studies, histories of science and of urban professions. The text concludes with a preliminary assessment of on-going research, identifying the topics addressed as well as the absent ones.
