Martin Wagner’s contribution to planning thought and management during the Weimar Republic is widely known, but he recedes into obscurity afterwards. However, he maintained a tenacious intellectual activity in his American exile, conducting teaching-oriented research as Associate Professor of Planning at Harvard Graduate School of Design and prolonging these explorations until his passing in 1957. Working with students and other colleagues – most prominently Walter Gropius – Wagner devised comprehensive proposals for an alternative regional urbanization pattern that combined radical city-core renewal for conspicuous services and high-end residence with a massive suburbanization of middle- and working-class housing and industrial activities. This scheme exacerbated his earlier conceptions and simultaneously incorporated new inflections stemming from a critical engagement with contemporary debates in the US, which allow a better understanding of his German period and the transatlantic transfer of planning ideologies. At Harvard, Wagner reinforced the political-economic perspective of his work, following a contradictory imperative to secure the implementation of proposals by assimilating capital’s spatiality in design strategies. Taking the dynamics of profit-oriented urbanization to their logical conclusion, the American Wagner envisioned a dark albeit consistent ‘diagram’ of the potential reach of a stark capitalist approach to territorial restructuring, prefiguring major urban shifts in subsequent decades.
Martin Wagner’s contribution to planning thought and management during the Weimar Republic is widely known, but he recedes into obscurity afterwards. However, he maintained a tenacious intellectual activity in his American exile, conducting teaching-oriented research as Associate Professor of Planning at Harvard Graduate School of Design and prolonging these explorations until his passing in 1957. Working with students and other colleagues – most prominently Walter Gropius – Wagner devised comprehensive proposals for an alternative regional urbanization pattern that combined radical city-core renewal for conspicuous services and high-end residence with a massive suburbanization of middle- and working-class housing and industrial activities. This scheme exacerbated his earlier conceptions and simultaneously incorporated new inflections stemming from a critical engagement with contemporary debates in the US, which allow a better understanding of his German period and the transatlantic transfer of planning ideologies. At Harvard, Wagner reinforced the political-economic perspective of his work, following a contradictory imperative to secure the implementation of proposals by assimilating capital’s spatiality in design strategies. Taking the dynamics of profit-oriented urbanization to their logical conclusion, the American Wagner envisioned a dark albeit consistent ‘diagram’ of the potential reach of a stark capitalist approach to territorial restructuring, prefiguring major urban shifts in subsequent decades. Read More
Related posts:
American Seafoods shelves sale plan, blames economic conditions
Why Are There So Few Schumpeterian Entrepreneurs from China? Understanding the Factors That Influence Entrepreneurial Opportunity Evaluation from a Comparative Culture Perspective
Perfectly imperfect and muddling through for sustainable futures
New perspectives for engineering as a global and transversal discipline
IMLS Announces the Newest Recipients of Museum Grants for African American History and Culture
Low-power flux gradient measurements for quantifying the impact of agricultural management on nitrous oxide emissions