ABSTRACT
An important theme of planning history as a research field is how and why planning knowledge has circulated within and between countries, a process which planning historians have usually termed “diffusion” (Sutcliffe 1981: 163–201; Ward 2000). The work of the post-1970 generation of planning historians featured these information flows and their effects. References to how planning in one country or one city was informed and perhaps to some extent shaped by the experiences of other countries and cities had long appeared in many ostensibly local planning history studies. In this they were reflecting the reality that, from at least around 1900, there was wide and remarkably rapid dispersion of knowledge of models such as Parisian-style Haussmannization and the Garden City, and practices such as zoning and town extension. A few historians identified a new and larger aspect of this: the existence by the early 20th century of an international urban planning movement, part of a wider “urban internationale” concerned with all aspects of city governance and cultural life (Piccinato 1974; Sutcliffe 1981).
