Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: A Transnational Life in Urban Planning and Design by Ellen Shoshkes (review)

The publication of this biography of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt by Ellen Shoshkes is timely. It is a reminder for professional planners and people affected by urban planning activity—which is to say, everybody—of the positive practical and philosophical reasons for planning, at a time when this activity is subject to criticism.

For me, as a professional British town planner and researcher, planning is the practical exercise of the utopian impulse—the activity, as the planning academic Patsy Healey puts it, of “making better places.”¹ A significant element of Tyrwhitt’s lifework was in developing both the science and the art of urban planning and design, but she also engaged with the other practical aspect of utopianism in experimenting with intentional communities, including Dartington, in Devon, England, and her own community at Sparoza, near Athens, Greece.

This book highlights the contribution made to planning thought, practice, and education by an individual who features rarely in modern accounts of the history of urban planning, particularly in England where her career began. The fact that this individual is a woman is of more than passing interest. The planning profession rarely celebrates its heroes, whose limelight is often taken by political decision makers, more senior managers, and prominent named architects, most of whom, particularly over Tyrwhitt’s working life, are usually men. Planners do tend to prefer to recognize teamwork and are often suspicious of individual eminence; hence role models are few for planners in general and for women planners in particular. But Tyrwhitt’s life, as represented in this book, should be an inspiration to all, regardless of sex.

Tyrwhitt herself has been represented elsewhere as merely an acolyte of Patrick Geddes (one of planning’s rare heroes), but such an understanding falls far short of the truth, as this book—perhaps the culmination of Shoshkes’s one-woman crusade for the recognition of Tyrwhitt’s lifework— makes abundantly clear. Tyrwhitt would draw on Geddesian thought, naturally, but synthesized this with modernist theories of planning, aligned with Siegfried Giedion’s work with the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne and subsequently the British Modern Architecture Research group, and was instrumental in developing the science of ekistics—the study of human settlements—alongside Constantinos Doxiados. This synthesis was framed not only by her own broad personal experience in agricultural, industrial, and regional research but also by her experience of people: from her travels internationally, from engaging in intentional communities such as Dartington, and from getting her hands dirty in the Women’s Land Army.

Even from the above admittedly inadequate summary of Tyrwhitt’s lifework it may be discerned that she had an interesting and varied career, but this simply does not do justice to the extent of her almost pathological polymathism, which is inspirational, if occasionally exhausting even to read about. It would be impossible in a short review such as this to adequately express the manifold aspects of Tyrwhitt’s professional and voluntary career—and redundant, since Shoshkes achieves this so well, representing, in a readable and engaging way, the incredibly full and influential life of this remarkable woman. Having such a full professional life to describe does not, however, leave Shoshkes room for discussion of much of Tyrwhitt’s personal life, although it is hinted that this may be because she did not have much of one and that, at certain points, this caused her some ill-health and the occasional regret. The book’s epilogue, on Tyrwhitt’s “garden on a Greek hillside” at Sparoza,² nonetheless serves as the “happy ending,” in which Shoshkes eloquently and without oversentimentality suggests a deep satisfaction that Tyrwhitt achieved in her active “retirement.” Shoshkes’s achievement with this biography is significant, since Tyrwhitt participated in such a broad range of activities and was associated with so many organizations that less disciplined authorship may have resulted in a sprawling mess.

The book is, nevertheless, meticulously researched, drawn from...