The “Social Planning Movement”

This chapter, by Avigail Sachs, traces a new postwar focus on sociology, city planning, and urban design, and ideas to promote their theoretical and pedagogical engagement with architecture education. Centered on the University of Pennsylvania, the history that Sachs relates echoes similar sociologically influenced developments at the University of California, Berkeley. As compared to Berkeley, however, the University of Pennsylvania experience, focused on the 1950s and 1960s, was distinguished by the leadership of G. Holmes Perkins, an interest in housing and urban renewal, and by attempts to weave “social planning” throughout the architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning curricula.