Marking the close of Concrete Dreams, this event explores the status of the modernist city today and what aspects of its legacy – built and idealistic – should be preserved.

During the 20th century, modernist architecture and planning transformed cities across the world – not least Newcastle. Driven by a revolutionary zeal and armed with new materials and construction techniques, architects and planners sought to city reimagine the city from the ground up. Rationality and functionalism became the guiding principles as new housing estates, urban motorways and modernist civic buildings redefined so many towns and cities.

But what was once new is now old. It’s now a century since Le Corbusier’s infamous plan to rebuild Paris along modernist lines, while it’s well over 50 years since modernist ideas began to fall favour. Utopian at root, the modernist city was rarely utopian in practice. And as many new developments failed to live up to their creators’ towering aspirations – practically and socially – demolitions began as early as the 1970s. Today, even with much of the modernist Newcastle already gone – and continuing to be lost – it remains a city degree defined by its modernist past.

In this event, we explore the status of the modernist city in the 21st century – in Newcastle and beyond. How do the interventions of the modernist era shape our understanding and experience of the city today? What’s been lost and what should be saved, who gets to decide and why? What challenges does the modernist city pose to how we designate and value ‘heritage’? And what possibilities does the energy and optimism of the ideas that underpinned the modernist era offer us today amid the myriad challenges of the 21st century?
Speakers

Richard Brook – Professor in Architecture, Lancaster University, and author of The Renewal of Post-War Manchester: Planning, Architecture and the State (2025).

Catherine Croft – Director the Twentieth Century Society, editor of C20 Magazine and author of Concrete Architecture (2005).

Owen Hopkins – Director of the Farrell Centre, and author of Lost Futures: The Disappearing Architecture of Post-War Britain (2017) and The Brutalists (2023).