Thomas Sharp was a key figure in mid-C20 British planning whose renown stems from two periods in his career. First, he came to attention as a polemical writer in the 1930s on planning issues, including as a virulent opponent of garden cities. His prose tempered over time and this phase perhaps culminated in Town Planning, first published in 1940 and reputed to have sold over 250,000 copies. Subsequently the plans he produced for historic towns in the1940s, such as Oxford, were very well known and were influential in developing ideas of townscape. Started as an official manual on village planning, The Anatomy of the Village followed on from the Scott Report, for which Sharp had been one of the Secretaries. When the Ministry decided not to proceed with the publication, Sharp himself published in it 1946. It became one of Sharp's best known works, with lucid prose and generous illustration by photograph and beautiful line-drawings of village plans. The aim of The Anatomy of the Village was to set out the main principles of village planning, especially in relation to physical design. Anatomy became a key text in thinking about villages in the post-war period; a period when there was great concern that settlements should develop in more sensitive ways than inter-war ribbon and suburban development patterns. The problems of poor quality development, unrelated to settlement form, was to continue to stimulate books such as Lionel Brett’s Landscape in Distress and campaigns from the Architectural Review. Reading the text today it still has much to offer: while some of its assumptions about the level of services a village might support clearly belong to another era, its beautiful and simple typological analyses of village form continue to be of relevance.

Sociological and demographic description of an old village

Blier illuminates the extraordinary architecture of the Batammaliba people of Western Africa, revealing these buildings as texts through which we can read the beliefs, psychology, traditions, and social concerns of their inhabitants. In doing so, she explores the role of vernacular architecture as an expression of culture. "A splendid analysis of the centrality of architecture in the daily lives of the Batammaliba and its integral role in articulating social values....The story is beautifully told in the best of anthropological traditions."—Judith R. Blau, Contemporary Society "A remarkable study....Blier's volume carries the study of African architecture to a qualitatively new level of scholarship. It introduces a new dimension whereby the architectural medium can be used to illuminate much of the entire belief system of any culture."—Labelle Prussin, African Arts "In this excellent book Blier provides a richly detailed and searching account of what architecture means to the Batammaliba of northern Togo and Benin....The finest account I have yet read of the relations between systems of beliefs, ritual practices, and African aesthetics and plastic arts....The ethnography and basic insight should be the envy of any social anthropologist."—T.O. Beidelman, Man

Learn the difference between a farrow and a barrow, and what distinguishes a weanling from a yearling. Country and city mice alike will delight in Julia Rothman’s charming illustrated guide to the curious parts and pieces of rural living. Dissecting everything from the shapes of squash varieties to how a barn is constructed and what makes up a beehive to crop rotation patterns, Rothman gives a richly entertaining tour of the quirky details of country life.

The rural is not what it used to be. No longer simply a site for agricultural production for the city, the relationship between the rural and urban has become much more complex. Established categories such as rural /urban and village/city no longer hold true. Rural and urban conditions have become increasingly blurred, so how can we identify and distinguish their specific characteristics? Where is the rural, and what role does it play in an urbanised world? In developing countries the countryside is a volatile and contradictory landscape: legally designated rural areas look like dense slums; factories intersect fields and farmers no longer farm. In contrast, in developed regions, the rural has become a highly controlled landscape of production and consumption: industrialised agriculture coexists with leisure landscapes for tourism, retirement and recreation. This issue of AD investigates how architects and researchers are critically engaging with the rural as an experimental field of exploration. Contributors: Neil Brenner, Christiane Lange, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Sandra Parvu, Cole Roskam, Grahame Shane, Deane Simpson, and Milica Topalovic and Bas Princen Architects: Anders Abraham, Joshua Bolchover and John Lin (Rural Urban Framework), Ambra Fabi and Giovanni Piovene (Piovenefabi), Rainer Hehl, Stephan Petermann (OMA), Huang Sheng Yuan (FieldOffice), and Sandeep Virmani (Hunnarshala)

John Nolen’s New Ideals in the Planning of Cities, Towns, and Villages is the most thorough assessment of city planning written by an American practitioner before 1920. It records the interplay of urban reform in Europe and the United States, the rise of the planning expert, the design of new towns, and the technique for directing urban expansion on systematic lines. Most important, it documents the blueprint for investing the "peace dividend" of the Great War to make urban life "more fit for democracy". Written for men fighting to make the world safe for democracy, New Ideals revealed how the domestic part of the peace program could justify their sacrifice. The wartime housing initiative had improved the living conditions of industrial workers and the same public regulation and control of the layout and character of residential neighbourhoods could provide what "men of service expect to find on their return, a new and better type of workman’s home." While New Ideals strained towards the utopian, experience tempered Nolen’s expectations and the high aims of the book were not immediately realised in a post-war society seeking a return to pre-war normalcy. However in the last decade, Nolen’s planned communities have been closely studied as the demand for pedestrian-oriented neighbourhoods set on sustainable lines has moved from novelty to policy. New Ideals is an important text not only for its design template, but also its aspirations. Nolen’s call to "make cites that will serve the needs--physical, economic, and spiritual-- of all people" lays at the heart of the city planning profession and the lessons Nolen imparted inform a new generation planning cities to be both resilient and just.

The publication of The Planning of a New Town in 1961 aroused remarkable interest. Its pages described a private new town, sponsored by the London County Council (LCC), to be built at Hook in Hampshire; a scheme that innovatively combined Garden City/New Town traditions with sensitivity to modern design. At its heart lay a multilevel and megastructural town centre intended to serve as a genuine focus for the gathering community, featuring shops and amenities placed on a pedestrian deck with cars and servicing beneath. The report itself proved extremely popular even though the New Town had fallen foul of political opposition at local and national levels and had been abandoned before any construction took place. It offers an insight into the flux of ideas that surrounded New Town development in the early 1960s. Analysing the world as it might have been not only identifies choices that were once available for shaping the built environment, it also often reveals once-cherished hopes and aspirations about how people might live in cities.