Many authors have argued that the exclusion of women in the history of art and architecture is not coincidental but based on deliberate discredit. Christine de Pizan already formulated this accusation in the fourteenth century in her Book of the City of Ladies. To support this argument, she created a reconstructed history of women in which she stressed the achievements and virtues of numerous women since antiquity. The anthologies edited by Katia Frey and Eliana Perotti should be regarded as one more attempt to record in writing the many neglected female contributions by asking how women contributed to the development of modern city planning. They assemble a wide scope of texts written by female theorists, architects, planners, and reformers, who were influential in very different areas. Many of these writings are (re)published and recognized for the first time, foregrounding female achievement of the last 150 years.

The editors are aware that there are and have been quite a few influential women planners and authors like Jane Jacobs, a critical observer of the man-made landscape who seriously challenged the discourse and formulated their special views. Of course, it would be more accurate to say that women are and always have been part of urbanism, but most of their contributions have disappeared from planning history. The problem is that many of them were not part of important networks, therefore, they were not as well known and by now have been more or less erased from history. Frey and Perotti point out that although their names may have become forgotten, many of the female pioneers came up with the most interesting concepts about urban design and had a strong impact on city planning. Of course, some of them were gifted with a famous name like Sybil Moholy-Nagy or could operate within an influential professional network like the American critic Ada Huxtable, and gained attention during their time, but the majority of these contributions seem to have disappeared. By looking at very different approaches of female architects and theorists in city planning (with a special focus on Germany, but not exclusively) the editors tried to excavate some of those doomed perspectives and included original writings by Adelheid Poninska, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Myra Warhaftig, and others. The ambition of the editors is to establish a strong link between historical viewpoints and the present by asking whether or not these idealistic or challenging visions are still valid today and how they contributed to shaping the urban environments as we experience them today. This discussion is led by a prestigious selection of internationally well-known contemporary theorists, among them Mary Pepchinski, Gerald Adler, Katrin Albrecht, Hilde Heynen, and Rixt Hoekstra.

Volume I covers the period from the last third of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, while Volume II extends it up to the present. Each draws from a research project and an archive of source texts, written by around 300 female authors from the nineteenth- to the twenty-first-century. Many of these authors did not publish in formats traditionally used for theoretical writings like treatises and monographs. Hence the research presented here included many types of primary sources that had been neglected so far by the historiography of city planning, especially journals, travel literature, belles-lettres, theoretical writings of different specialist fields, even screen-plays, and interviews. The scope of source materials alone shows, that although women were mostly excluded from the operative part of town construction, they were very active in the theoretical field. Both books follow the same structure: Each chapter consists of an analytical article, which introduces an annex of carefully selected source texts written by female theorists. The latter are accompanied by short and very useful biographies of each theorist. Photographs, plans, and other visual source materials provide even more historical contextualization. 

The two-volume set was devised at the ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and is a German-language publication with a multilingual leaning. The introductory articles are written in German, while source materials in German, French, Italian, or English are presented each in their original languages, as these languages are considered to be commonly understood in Swiss academia. Source materials written in other languages, for example by Chinese and Russian theorists, were translated into German.

The second volume by the editors continues the successful first issue with its inspiring collection of essays on female pioneers in architecture. Published in 2019, it focuses on female contributions to city planning and sheds light on those early and some recent protagonists who provided substantial input to the urban discourse. Most of them still have not received sufficient recognition for their work and therefore, the books’ most valuable agenda is to fill the existing historiographical gap. While the content seems to be at first glance a random collection of samples from different times and places all over the world, including Europe, South America, and China, it turns out to cover some few key aspects of contemporary city planning and therefore, the selection proves to be fully justified.

Mary McLeod’s first chapter, “Theorists of City Planning and their Concepts – a Reflection” ¹⁰ establishes the theoretical frame and lays out the discussion path for the whole book. It serves both as an introduction and elucidates the compilation of essays by introducing the individual authors and their theoretical positions. The content of the book addresses important issues of contemporary urban theory and covers aspects such as green spaces but also the rapid growth of megacities along with accompanying problems such as slums and segregation. While gender studies are used as an academic tool to question the discourse, original texts are embedded to preserve written historical evidence. One of the key ideas in the current discourse has a rather long tradition – the issue of green spaces in the city. Vittoria Calzolari discussed urban landscapes already in the 1950s and pointed out the importance of public green as a fundamental quality of the city. Recent discussions on ecology and climate change have emphasized the importance of this discussion thereby usually ignoring that its origin can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. Original historical texts by Maria Pasolini, with an introduction by Katrin Albrecht, in “The Rediscovery of Italian Building Art and Garden Art. Maria Pasolini’s Contribution to Urban Theory in Italy after 1900,” ¹¹ provide an intriguing insight into Italian architecture garden planning and demonstrate female interest in this topic already more than a century ago.

The introduction of social qualities to architecture is often regarded as a typical female contribution to planning and of course, is also included in this book. Adelheid Poninska was a German noblewoman with strong socialist ambitions who focused on housing for the poor and published under a male pseudonym her city theories. She went as far as to argue that the social category is a necessary category of systematical city planning. In “Adelheid Poniska – The Question of Dwelling as Cardinal Point of Urban Theory,” ¹² Katia Frey and Eliana Perotti present her unusual biography and discuss her influence among contemporary city planners. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, better known as the wife of her famous husband, Bauhaus-artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, was an important artist and theorist herself. She wrote numerous articles and books, bringing increased attention to vernacular architecture and urban issues. Hilde Heynen introduces the reader to this visionary pioneer of modernism in “The Architectural Essence of Urbanism. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy on the City as ‘Matrix of Man’,” ¹³ and included three original texts by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: “Villas in the Slums” (1960), “In Defense of Architecture” (1962), and “City Planning and the Historical Perspective” (1964). Helena Syrkus was one of the few women who actually had a strong impact on the otherwise male-dominated Modern Movement, the CIAM. In “Writing an alternative History.: Helene Syrkus and the CIAM,” ¹⁴ Rixt Hoekstra argues that the CIAM was more of an intellectual network with different, sometimes contradicting voices while Syrkus, who was not only co-author of the Athens Charter of 1933 but collaborated for years closely with Sigfried Giedion and Le Corbusier was the one who carried this movement to Poland. Mary Pepchinsky takes the reader to Germany in the aftermath of World War II and its problems concerning housing and poverty. In her article “For Each Family a Single Woman: The Bauhaus architect Wera Meyer-Waldeck and the Challenges of Accommodating Elderly Women in Post War Western Germany,” ¹⁵ she introduces Wera Meyer-Waldeck as a female Bauhaus architect who focused on dwellings for elderly single women. Gerald Adler takes a look at Myra Warhaftig’s commitment in Berlin and her strong impact on city planning in “Between Radical Hope and Pragmatic Implementation: Myra Warhaftig’s Feminist Architecture Theory and Practice in West-Berlin of the 1980s.” ¹⁶ The book ends by discussing three rather individual approaches to urbanism and city planning in various countries. In “Vittoria Calzolari and the Project ‘Landscape’ in Italy: A Versatile Urbanist and Intellectual,” ¹⁷ Claudia Mattogno and Cristina Renzoni turn to the 1960s in Italy and present the work of Vittoria Calzolari. Thierry Paquot reflects upon “The Urban Theorist Françoise Choay. A Discourse-Building Propagator of the Discipline,” a female French urbanist and theorist who followed the footsteps of Camillo Sitte. Chen Ting looks at “Wenyuan Wu and the Search for Alternatives in Urban Change in Today’s China,” ¹⁸ who suggested rather unusual alternatives to city planning in rural areas China.