Currently on at the Kemper Art Museum (on WashU campus) is the exhibition Metabolic City, which examines plans for urban design understood through the metaphor of the human body. Like a human body, a city needs interacting systems, operating at different levels of analysis, that work effectively in order to maintain a healthy state. The exhibit focuses on work from a few different countries (Japan, the UK, the Netherlands) and most of it seems to be from the 1950s-1960s.
Some of the visions from that era are really interesting. It's especially interesting to me that the work highlighted here emerged in the postwar period, the period when it seems to me that suburban sprawl and the decline of city cores really accelerated... yet it was a visionary time when people were really interested in how they could change their cities into something that they wanted them to be. It's been in the later decades that there's been a preference movement back to pre-war characteristics such as core density, but for new reasons such as their environmental footprint.
I'm a fan of the dense, vibrant city core and follow developments in that direction in the St. Louis area with a lot of interest, but without any formal background in the urban planning field it can be difficult to develop and articulate my opinions in more detail, or feel confident doing so.
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