Urban Design Since 1945: A Global Perspective reviews the emergence of urban design as a global phenomenon. At the end of the Second World War many European and Asian cities lay in ruins and in need of reconstruction, millions of people in both continents had become homeless refugees as a result of the hostilities. The book opens with the urgent need to rebuild cities and re-house refugees. Modernist designers attempted to solve this problem through the industrialisation of housing and the machine city model on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Against this background, the book traces the global collapse of the modern movement in architecture and its comprehensive planning schemes for central governments. It describes how Latin America and then East Asia began to rapidly urbanise, shifting the global urban centre away from Europe and overturning existing urban design models, resulting in global megacities of an unprecedented scale as populations reached over 20 million people. By outlining the dominant models in urban design over the last sixty years the Metropolis, the MegaCity, Fragmented Metropolis and Global Megacities the book provides an essential framework for students of the subject.
