The 15th Biennial National Conference on Planning History: SACRPH, Toronto, 3-6 October 2013

Last autumn, the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) held its fifteenth biennial meeting in Toronto, Canada. The meeting confirmed the association's reputation for vibrancy, eclecticism, and interdisciplinarity, bringing together some 320 urban, planning, and architectural historians; geographers; polit- ical scientists; sociologists; planning practitioners; and others. Programme committee co-chairs Nancy Kwak and Kristin Larsen wove together an extraordinarily coherent tapestry of 70 concurrent sessions, while the local arrangements committee led by Robert Lewis effectively mobilised local resources, held a reception at the Carlu - a beautifully restored Art Moderne concert hall - organised a provocative plenary session and put together the customary pre- and post-conference tours led by local subject experts.Sessions and papers: eclectic variationThe sessions and papers were as always eclectic. Perhaps acknowledging this, SACRPH does not assign an overarching theme to its conferences or group sessions into rigidly managed tracks. As at previous meetings the temporal and spatial focus was largely on the postwar period and on the United States, although several standout papers and sessions treated topics as diverse as the global influence of British planning ideas from the eighteenth century onwards, turn-of-the-twentieth-century planning movements and projects in a variety of locales, and the impact of the Cold War on urban development and urban life in Manila, Cherbourg, Berlin, and Baltimore. Reflecting the intensive interest of scholars in particular places, people, and ideas, two-part sessions were given over to the postwar planning of Pittsburgh, the legacy of Raymond Unwin, and social change and physical urban spaces.Transportation, infrastructure (broadly defined), and housing were major leitmo- tifs. Several papers approached the historical planning of airports and the impacts of highway and streetcar networks on the development of cities. A session on 'infra- structure as utopian planning' provocatively explored the impact of electrification and desalinisation in a variety of contexts, while another delved into the 'aesthetic infra- structure' of suburban cultural landscapes. A third session focused on the relationship between infrastructure and urban order, from the historical impact of street lighting on policing to the ideologies embedded in public works architecture. The dominant thread, however, was housing, housing policy and real estate development. This is perhaps unsurprising given the dominance and increasing corporate consolidation of private housing production, the often tragic history of state-orchestrated slum clear- ance and urban 'renewal,' especially in the United States, and the more recent trans- formation of inner cities by gentrification - all factors that have profoundly altered the physical form of North American cities and regions.The focus on housing was given full expression by outgoing SACRPH president Lawrence Vale (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), who delivered a luncheon address on 'Design-Politics in Planning History'. Journeying from the eighteenth-century settlement of Savannah, Georgia, to Lutyens' Delhi, to public housing in Atlanta and his hometown of Chicago, Vale reminded attendees that planning and design decisions always have distributional effects, and therefore analysis cannot and should not avoid attention to politics.It should not go unmentioned that large numbers of graduate students presented papers and posters, some with the generous support of the Society for their travel expenses. Sessions on research and publishing strategies of special relevance to junior scholars were well attended, as was a student reception. SACRPH has long prioritised the nurturing of emerging scholars and this conference was no exception.The conference setting as a themeFor the first time since its founding, the association met beyond the borders of the United States. …

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