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Barbara Ward argues that rapid global urbanization has created a new human habitat that we barely understand and have failed to manage responsibly. She shows that cities do not evolve naturally but are shaped by historical forces, technological change, and political choices. Her most urgent claim is that without coordinated regional planning and new forms of social cooperation, both developed and developing cities risk ecological damage, social breakdown, and structural immobility.

I agree with her emphasis on understanding cities as interconnected systems, but I am more skeptical of her confidence in large-scale planning as a primary solution. The political, cultural, and economic obstacles to such comprehensive planning are greater than Ward acknowledges, and technology alone cannot resolve structural inequalities.

In its 1972 context, the text reflects rising environmental awareness and postwar optimism about planning, yet it also anticipates many contemporary issues: megacities, global migration, ecological limits, and urban inequality.

Ward’s arguments connect to Mumford’s critique of the technocratic city and to Jacobs’s insistence on human scale, although Ward places far more weight on regional planning.

For future architectural practice, her insistence on seeing buildings within larger ecological, social, and infrastructural systems remains essential, as does her call for designs that promote equity and livability.

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Reading Barbara Ward’s text feels strangely discouraging. The problems she described more than fifty years ago — ecological limits, unequal access to resources, and the need for more just and compact cities — remain almost unchanged. It is sad how relevant her warnings still are.

What troubles me most is the sense that, despite decades of debate and planning, very little has actually shifted. If the same issues persist, I wonder whether approaching them with the same methods makes any sense. Ward’s proposals were clear and reasonable, yet the structural barriers that prevented action then are still present now.

This makes me think that the problem is no longer a lack of insight, but a lack of new strategies. Perhaps we need to rethink not only what we plan, but how we attempt to bring about change at all. Only then might the concerns Ward raised finally move beyond being repeatedly observed — and actually be addressed.

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Barbara Ward explains, in her abtract An Urban Planet, how humanity is undergoing a significant transformation; urbanisation of the entire planet. She argues that because this urbanisation is occuring so fast, that these urbanised areas lack existential elements for human life such as green spaces. Although her text is over half a century old, it seems relatively contemporary as it focuses on similar issues and uses similar arguments. When putting her text in contrast with Sennett's text, it appears that they both have exact opposite opinions of how to solve the problem with the cities and what the problems even are; Ward states the cities must be more planned, orderly and thus become beautiful while Sennet said cities are too orderly and secure and must become somewhat dangerous and chaotic to become liveable again.

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While reading Ward's text, it felt refreshing to see such a statistical text laid out in a historical storytelling way, and to get a wider perspective on developing countries. She addresses the issue of missing a community and a diverse environment, reminiscent of Sennett's text last time.

Though she covers the root causes and develops her point efficiently.

I think the most important aspect that I took away was the fact that the government plays a larger role than has been portrayed in other texts. It is not enough just to have ideas. If the budget is going into arms that protect a dysfunctional inner environment from outside, then something must be wrong. That is to say that I believe we cannot rely on bottom-up initiatives, as the top will come and ruin it if it wishes to do so. Of course, having only one of either is never the right solution.

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In Barbara Wards Text, she writes about how cities are today, what their problems are, and how to address these problems. She states, that in order to address  the problems, they have to be understood first. Accordingly she goes into detail on how cities came to be, mentioning agriculture and its surplus, later industrialization, population growth due to better health care and the influence of modern means of transport. She states that we, other than animals which don’t have the ability to look ahead, we could avoid future problems by city planning. She says that cities in developing world countries evolved on the basis of serving other (western) countries. They grew fast and face problems like unemployment, too much migration from country side to the city, slums and the lack of infrastructure. Developed cities face different challenges like social disparities, ghettos, overloaded traffic, ecological decay etc. Developed countries need different solutions than developing countries. Mostly the developing countries lack funding. She suggests, that a stable agricultural is the crucial factor to further develop the cities, including the creation of intermediately sized cities, to relieve the strain on the bigger ones. She says if we don’t address these problems, the cities will become chaos. Our human will will decide whether we can fix the problems or not.

I like how this text very systematically tries to break down what the problem is and where we have to start to fix it. It gives a good overview, while still going into detail enough. I think it’s interesting, how it kind of opposes what e.g. Sibyl Moholy Nagy said, with each city being so individual that “too much” science or analysis wouldn’t make sense in the context of city planning. However, similar to Moholy Nagy she states, that we can’t count on technology to fix these problems. What I further find very interesting, is how modern the text still seems. Sadly this has to do with the fact that the problems of then haven’t really been fixed yet.

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I found the text to be a consise description of the problem with urbanisation. I am glad that it looked at the history in order to show why the problem is exists in current times while it hasn't in the past. However, the text was nothing revolutionary. A large part was just a description with very carefully worded opinion at the end to not use any personal language. The proposed solutions are worded such that they don't come from the author directly, but of course they were picked by the author. But maybe that is because this is one of the first texts with this perspective and it only sounds obvious to me now. I didn't find myself disagreeing with text and would also suggest it as a good solution to create multiple smaller centres rather than just a few large ones. We see this very well in Zürich even done deliberately by political means as well as automatically by the growing industry. Creating new centres instead of expanding existing ones gives people more choice and impact on their surroundings.

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Ward’s text feels surprisingly contemporary: cities still expand faster than planning, infrastructure, or social systems can keep up. Her observations about slums and favelas show how urban migration often outpaces a city’s ability to provide housing or jobs. What struck me most is her insistence on “human scale” planning. Even though some cities now try to become more people-friendly by reducing car traffic, many urban environments(especially in the U.S.) were built for cars, not humans, and are extremely hard to remodel. Ward’s message remains clear: urbanization will happen regardless, so the real question is whether we choose to shape it responsibly or let it unfold chaotically and live with the consequences.

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What I mainly took from the text is the idea that fast urban growth in many countries isn’t happening because cities offer great opportunities, but because rural areas often can’t support people anymore. The author also shows how past economic systems, especially during colonial times, still shape how cities develop today. I found it interesting how many planning strategies failed because they didn’t deal with the real economic problems behind the growth.

I don’t fully agree with the author’s strong focus on population growth as the main cause of urban issues. It feels a bit too simplified, because politics, land use, and investment choices matter just as much. Some parts also reflect an older way of looking at “developing” cities as problems that need to be fixed.

Knowing the text comes from the 1970s helps explain this perspective, it was a time when big international institutions believed heavily in planning models and economic growth thheories. So the tone makes sense historically.

It also relates well to other texts we’ve read about uneven development and how global systems shape local urban conditions. Many authors talk about similar links between migration, inequality, and economic structures.

For my own work as a future architect, the main message is that design doesn’t exist outside of social and economic realities. If I want to design responsibly, I need to understand the bigger forces that push people to move, settle, or struggle in certain places.

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While reading Barbara Ward’s text I could relate with her frustration with how humans deal with crises. It seems like we are not open to learn from them, but rather pretend they aren’t happening. She writes about cities growing so fast that we’re basically living in a new habitat without understanding it. It made me think about today, how we also live in a time of crises. Climate change, housing, energy generation and so on. And still I am not sure if we as a society are really moving in a new direction. A lot of time has passed since her text and we now know more than ever but our knowledge doesn’t automatically make us act.

I also found it interesting how Ward splits the world in two. “Developed lands” should learn from disorder and fix their cities, while “developing countries” need jobs and industry to catch up. It felt like she was trying to offer a universal solution but couldn’t quite get there, because the problems aren’t equal to begin with. For me, the text raises the question of whether one model can ever solve global urban crises. Maybe instead of searching for one answer only, it’s more realistic to admit that different places will need different ways of surviving.

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Ward's Text An Urban Planet from 1971 analyses the problem of the increasing population in cities. She states that our "misuse of an environment" might have us end up in a lemming-like situation.

In the text Ward talks about the city development and how we went from a well working city to something rather dysfunctional due to the rapid growth of cities. She points out that we rather shift our focus towards space technologies and exploration rather than spending the money on the society on earth and therefore "simply let the problems go by default".

Reading the text it felt like she's trying to make people aware and urge them to start working towards change without her giving concrete advice how to. Like most writers on urban planning she seems to point out something that seemed to be obvious just with a slightly different angle. She is talking about investment allocation and a migrational issue and in a last part about how agriculture and city networks could serve as means to tackle poverty.

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I think Barbara Ward makes some very clear and important points. Even though she wrote many years ago, her worries about the environment and global inequality still feel very real today. The idea that all countries share one future is something we still struggle to act on.

I like how she dives into the history of urbanization to understand this constantly changing “living being” that is the city. I think it is important to understand how the world works - both human-made systems and natural elements. Only in this way can we not just react to crises but also prevent them. That is much more resilient and leads to long-term solutions. What’s also important to add is that the learning process never stops; we have to keep exploring and learning from our surroundings because they are always changing and different in every place in the world.

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When I read Ward’s text, I was struck by how urgent her message feels even today. She talks about cities growing so fast that we can’t just ignore it anymore, and the numbers she gives are shocking. What really stood out to me was her idea that cities aren’t just collections of buildings but they’re ecosystems that need balance. That made me think about how planning should be about people and the environment, not just about expansion.

I also liked her focus on “human scale.” It feels true because so many cities seem designed for cars or markets instead of for people’s everyday lives. She points out that this isn’t just a problem for rich countries; in poorer countries, it’s even harder because cities grow without jobs or infrastructure.

“The choice is not between acting and not acting; it is between doing well and doing badly.” That line sums up the whole text for me.

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In An Urban Planet, Barbara Ward presents a sweeping analysis of the global forces driving cities into a period of unprecedented transformation. She argues that urbanization has become a structural condition of modern life: populations are concentrating at extraordinary speed, placing enormous pressure on housing, infrastructure, and the ecological systems that sustain them. Throughout the text, she touches upon an large range of interconnected issues: environmental limits, demographic growth, economic disparities, energy use, and the political challenges of development. This breadth reflects her long-standing engagement with global affairs, rooted in her background in economics, international cooperation, and social justice.

Ward’s approach is distinctly top-down. She frames the urban crisis as something that cannot be addressed by municipalities or even individual nations alone. Instead, she calls for coordinated international action capable of matching the scale of the problems she identifies. For her, urban planning must be embedded in global environmental responsibility, transnational financing, and the redistribution of resources from wealthy countries to poorer, rapidly urbanizing regions. I believe this globalist perspective is both one of the text’s strengths and its most utopian dimension: it imagines forms of collaboration that seem politically difficult to achieve.

What I find compelling is Ward’s insistence on a qualitative transformation of urban development. She warns against believing that technological solutions, statistical models, or economic growth alone can guarantee the viability of cities.

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In her text, Barbara Ward draws attention to the rapid growth of cities and its consequences. She criticizes the ignorant attitude humans often adopt when facing crises. Instead, she suggests that we must “grasp the nature of our habitat so that we can hope to survive in it.” While reading this, I wondered what Ward would think about current discussions of crises, since our own time is often described as an “age of crises.” How do today’s crises differ from those of the 1960s, and how has our attitude toward them changed over time?

Ward proposes, on the one hand — similar to Richard Sennett — that we take a close look at disorder in order to improve cities in the “developed lands.” On the other hand, she illustrates that conditions in the “developing countries” are fundamentally different. As a result, she presents two different sets of proposals, which seem inconsistent, since she is ultimately searching for a universal solution to end the crises.

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Humans might be the only species knowing — or wanting to know — what happens to us, so Barbara war in An Urban Planet. „The blind, indifferent misuse of an environment“ however, shows that humans in fact do behave like the other species, in a, what Ward calls blind, reactive fashion, poisoning our environment. Again and again Ward likens the human fate to „a lemming-like catastrophe“, an animal which, as Ward explains, simply surge to a collective death, should disaster strike. Her metaphors aren’t meant to amuse, but to portray the urgency of the matter. An impending doom of collective catastrophe, shall we not act immediately. How do we avoid such a horrible fate, continuing to behave like this? Barbara Wards introduction alone portrays just how important it is to „grasp the nature of our habitat so that we can hope to survive in it“. This understanding builds the foundation to her approach to city-planning. Ward demonstrates the explosion of the world’s population between 1920-60. Her focus, however lies on the United States; according to contemporary calculations during the time of the text, 100 million people must be added to America’s urban settlement — a goal, or rather a destiny, that needed a solution within the following 30 years. Cities are characterized by their horrors, not their beauty. The catastrophe Ward describes would not exist, if the population boom brought forth safe and efficient cities, but it doesn’t. Tp heal the man we need a diagnosis; we need to truly look at the roots of the issues to actually be able to solve them. Barbara Ward skillfully takes the reader through history, biology, excerpts of the Bible and Charles Dickens’ works, through the Victorian era and finally to the 20th century, to illustrate the understanding of cities most populations lack and need.

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An Urban Planet (1972), pp. 30-39

Published in: Journal of the American Institute of Planners

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Post your reading response to the text until 27.11.25 13:00 on this Padlet

Suggestions for the Reading Response:

-What are the most important arguments and suggestions that you can take away from the text?

-Which arguments would you disagree with the author on, and why?

-How do you evaluate the text in light of its historical context?

-How could this text be related to other texts already read in this seminar?

-Which arguments do you consider significant for your future work as an architect?