| This dissertation examines the concept and practice of planning as it has contended with the rise of the industrialized metropolis. Tasked with managing a rapidly changing society, the field of planning realizes the possibilities and limits inherent in the Enlightenment's turn to practical reason. On account of planning's double-sided nature as a project of liberation and a method of collective domination, my project focuses on two moments of crisis that accentuate its dynamic tension: the upheavals following 1800 and the Great Depression. The plan's marginalization of subjective experience is the basis of an analysis of “conservative modernism” in the Weimar Republic, especially Carl Schmitt, whose early work on Romanticism lays out the terms of his critique of the impersonalization of power through secularization. The metropolis is the most visible symbol of alienation in an impersonalized environment, but I argue that total planning emerges with the decentralizing movement in the years prior to 1900 through the 1930s. Projects like the Garden City pushed urbanism's conceptual boundaries to include both regional networks and the depth relations of local communities. The concept of planning obtains psychological currency as a means of stabilizing inner- and interpersonal relations as a system of debts and credits. This structuring function has left its mark on the literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Goethe's Elective Affinities places Ottilie's sacrificial model of redemption alongside Charlotte and the Captain as representatives of the planner's principle of risk assessment and value-free judgment. Rilke's study of landscape painting, Worpswede, investigates the uncertain boundary between the subject and its materiality in the interpenetration of the artist and the observed landscape. The integration of self and other that is both feared and courted is a precursor to a planning concept like that of the “growing house”, which will be formulated by urban planners of the 1920s and 1930s such as Leberecht Migge and Martin Wagner. In their case, integration entails the organization of the private space of the dwelling into a productive unit capable of withstanding the buffets of history now imagined as an ongoing state of crisis. |
