Berlin's urban development between the beginning of the Kaiserreich in 1871 and the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933 epitomizes the rise and transformation of urbanism. Tracing the management of Berlin's explosive urban growth in the second half of the nineteenth century, through the conceptual and spatial shift towards the city region at the beginning of the twentieth century, and onto a new understanding of city planning in the Weimar republic, Everett argues that these transformations are governed by the shift in their underlying ideologies. While city planning and municipal administration in the nineteenth century operated with the liberal principles of the free market, shaped by law and trade, by the 1930s they were increasingly formed by a corporatist vision of an integrated and productive city and society. This shift in ideology underlay broad social and cultural transformations. While the beginning and the endpoint designate key historical datums, decisive spatial moments structure Everett's book: the regular city grid of Berlin's extension plan of 1862, the so-called ‘Hobrecht plan’, the dispersed city region in the Greater Berlin competition entries of 1910 and the large-scale city planning of the Weimar republic. For Everett, these represent as much the evolution of the shape and scale of the city as their respective ideologies.
After an introduction explaining his theoretical approach and an overview of the historiography of liberalism and urban history, the first two chapters outline how a pervasive liberal worldview shaped not only municipal administration and city planning but also the understanding of society. One of the book's strengths is how it relates the spatial logic of the nineteenth-century Berlin urban expansion plan through this liberal worldview. While the plan is often dismissed as a minimal framework regulating urban development, Everett argues that spatial strategies, such as the regularity of the grid or the generous dimensions of streets, were understood to propel equal economic opportunities and allow the free flow of goods, people and commodities; a spatial infrastructure supporting the liberal principle of economic freedom and the abstract equality of citizens. The underlying belief in the self-regulating capacity of the market, including its capacity to balance society and to promote happiness for all, is shown by Everett to be reflected in other concurrent planning theories and plans in other countries. He traces how the liberal worldview sought to adapt and manage urbanization and industrialization, as well as how the dynamism of urban growth and some of its consequences, such as rampant speculation and the poor conditions of workers’ housing, increasingly challenged the principles of liberal thought, in Berlin and other cities such as Paris and Vienna.
Everett identifies the appearance of the city region in the early twentieth century as a key shift in how city planning, administration and government sought to respond to and mobilize capitalism. He presents the entries of the Greater Berlin competition, a pragmatic form of planning aimed at achieving an organic unity across the city region, encompassing green spaces, transport networks and a focus on housing, as exemplifying the attempt to plan a more unified, interlinked and organic territory and society. At the same time, Berlin's administration sought to expand its territory; attempting to negotiate urban growth and the parallel redistribution of industries, populations and municipal tax income. For Everett, it was only through the war and the revolution of 1918 that the corporatist ideology fully emerged. He describes how municipal government navigated hyperinflation and the great depression, while striving towards a coherent, unified and productive society, which is examined through the practices of the construction industry, housing production and population politics. Urban planning recast its scope, shifting towards an understanding of the totality of the city as an organism, relating urban space to population growth and economic productivity. Rationalization of construction, efficiency, functionality and small-scale agriculture are identified as the themes through which modern architecture expressed its adherence to the overarching ideology of corporatism. The Frankfurt kitchen epitomized for Everett a synthesis of this ideology, combining an aesthetics of truth and honesty, rationalized of construction and scientific management theories, with the aim of transforming working-class life.
Everett's contribution lies in mapping how broad and dispersed urbanism was and how the conception of the city was linked to broad social cultural transformations. In each of the three stages covered in the book, the planning of the city always entailed a reflection on its citizens, community and society, and their productivity, welfare and happiness. Everett aims to show that the various processes, events, actors and practices were unified in a synthesis, governed by the respective ideology. The focus on ideology, however, eclipses other potential lines of continuity and transformation at play in the growth of the city. It does not account for the rise of knowledge and expertise in the emergence and transformation of urbanism, nor does it attribute urbanism itself an evolutionary dynamism. For example, the lens of ideology cannot account for the continuity of multi-scalar planning and the role of the scale of the neighbourhood initiated through the Greater Berlin competition. While the Frankfurt kitchen can be seen as representative of a corporatist worldview, taking an exclusivist view does not surface its lines of continuity to spatial and social reasoning about the modern domestic family that had been at play since the late nineteenth century, or how architecture's particular expertise came to be harnessed and mobilized through the design of modern housing.
Nonetheless, Everett outlines a fascinating broad trajectory of the debates of city planners, municipal administrators and architects about the restructuring of the city and society between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The strength of the book lies in unfolding how the shift of the form and scale of the city was accompanied by changing conceptions of its spaces and its population, and how these could be planned, administered and governed.
