The Applied Urban Planning of Master Gaston Bardet : Conferences, Courses and Institutions

Abstract

The present article deals with Gaston Bardet’s contribution to the teaching and promulgation of urban planning. Historiographical studies view him as a French urban planning theorist with an impeccable bibliography, produced mainly in the 1930s and 1940s. They trace his career as a teacher of urban planning in Latin America, especially Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Venezuela, prioritizing conferences and applied urban planning courses. This idea was propagated as one that aimed to intervene in grand urban compositions and required theoretical knowledge and, above all, plans were focused on concrete cases based on a human scale. For Jean-Louis Cohen (1989) Bardet was extremely critical professionally and this led him to be an outsider in the urban planning community, which explains why, unable to find work in France, he sought out alternative settings. There is, however, another reading, which is not opposed to but complements this interpretation with the supposition that, in South America at least, Bardet was invited because of his indefatigable efforts to promote urban planning that combined territory, city-building, and the human being and that the welcome reception of this idea was not confined to religious circles. Bardet’s work as a teacher and promoter of urban planning ideas began with the Institut d’Urbanisme at the Université de Paris (IUUP), in 1937. This institute inherited the most long-standing urban planning teaching traditions in France and was founded by Marcel Poëte and Henri Sellier. This tradition was set in an institutional and intellectual context of the early 20th century when a distinct body of urban planning practices and ideas emerged in Europe. Teaching came to play the role of creating frameworks to meet the new requirements, including the 1919 Cornudet law, a legal instrument to help draw up urban plans to improve, embellish and expand cities.