Genealogy of method in early modern British planning practice 1920–1965

How can the irruption of ‘rational’ analytical and procedural practices in twentieth-century British town planning be explained? My argument is that what planning histories routinely describe as the ‘systems revolution’ of the 1960s is actually the last phase of a societal epistemic shift associated with early modernism. ‘Planning methodology’ is a historical and transitory object that itself has to be accounted for – what were its conditions of emergence, its distinctive objects? Who could speak of them, and with what techniques and authority? I show that early modern planners sought contemporaneity with the complex, yet in principle decipherable, structure and performance of cities understood as purposeful organisms. Two key crises in the postwar period provided entry points for epistemic transformation: the crisis of the map-form and the crisis of planning administration. Impersonal serial data, and rhizomatic plans, came into existence within and because of a companion discourse on ‘planning methodology’.