THE MODERN CITY REVISITED.

Edited by Thomas Deckker, London: E & FN Spon. 2000. [pound]27.50

The significance of this book will probably lie more in its actual publication than in its content. We have eloquent pieces on the Peterlee that never was, by Lubetkin's monographer John Allen, on Milan's QT8 by Judi Loach, on Birmingham of the 1960s by Andrew Higgott, and on Brasilia by Thomas Deckker. This heroic posturing is preceded by appetizers including Catherine Cooke, excellent as ever, on Revolutionary planning in Russia, and James Dunnett on Corb's unrealized visions.

The actual content of the pieces is largely unsurprising. What stands out from the collection is Michael Sorkin's observation that pure Modernist planning sought to create an 'urbanism that ... seeks to make its peace with the planet': public spaces were to be generated by transportation interchanges rather than draughted, Beaux-Arts fashion, by the set-square; and the reallocation of private space was, following Ebenezer Howard, to democratize city society. It is ironic that the gated classical-colonial estates of 1990s 'New Urbanists' have the bossiest and least democratic of all planning policies, but succeed most in the supposedly liberal USA: apparently, it is the actual built quality of the city that determines its success; but how one misses that mid-century vision and excitement today.