The period between the two World Wars in Europe was marked by intense anxiety about social conflict and the envisioned global catastrophes of war, social and cultural decay, political extremism and environmental degradation. In a culture of fearful anticipations, town planning developed as a discipline in Europe and attempted to build a rational order into the ground. Planners sought to replicate eco-systems in the built environment to organise society in such a way as to remove the structural conditions for conflict, and recreate an imagined ‘natural’ order. These ideas coincided with the development of the concept of what Helmut Lethen calls the ‘rational type’ in post-war societies.

The assumption of an inherent rationality in a subject’s behaviour and responses to external stimuli are closely related to the idea that nature held a perfect ecological model for societies, which, if built into human societies, could negate the threat of war and disorder. The interest in eco-systems, the search for an equilibrium in nature, and the assumed predictability of human behaviour foreshadowed subsequent discussions about systems theory, games theory and cybernetics. This lecture will discuss how the ecologically-inspired work of early town planners, and the broader intellectual culture, was a product of anxiety about disorder in the twentieth-century and served as a proto-version of computerization.