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Experimental Planning after the Blitz. Non-governmental Planning Initiatives and Post-war Reconstruction in Coventry and Rotterdam, 1940-1955 This article probes into two non-governmental planning initiatives in the bombed cities of Coventry and Rotterdam. It articulates planning practices by non-state actors at the local level during the 1940s and early 1950s. These practices comprise a set of alternative visions on urban reconstruction and the regeneration of the urban community. Most of these social planning experiments were thwarted by the authorised planning schemes of public authorities from the early 1950s onwards. However, in engaging with recent historiography on post-war urban planning, these non-governmental experiments disclose that urban reconstruction and planning was not an uncontested or monopolised top-down endeavour that was initiated exclusively by public authorities and professional planners in the 1940s.

Historical analysis is increasingly used as a tool in the study of present-day populism in Europe. The past is often explored as a source of analogies through which to examine today’s populism, and at other times in search of causal mechanisms to explain the current populist wave. In this paper we focus on a third kind of link between populism and the past, namely the ways populist movements and leaders use and abuse history and historical memory in their quest for mass support. This angle on the populism/history nexus can yield deep insight into the ideological make-up of these movements and their voters, and populism’s discursive dynamics and strategies.Focusing on contemporary right-wing populism and its approach to the dark past of European countries, the paper conducts an exploratory analysis that posits three ways in which the past is (ab)used by populists: (a) the positive reassessment of dark history; (b) the recourse to fake history; (c) the evocation and subsequent denial of links with the dark past. In examining each, we use examples taken from the cases of Italy and The Netherlands to check the plausibility of our categories across different national cases.

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In contrast to the image of the Netherlands as a solid state since the early modern period, this article argues that Dutch statehood was the product of a hard-won process that required a good part of the 19th century to reach any sort of administrative consolidation. We look at state building from a decentered perspective, not so much from above or below, but rather from the middle, concentrating on the province of South Holland, and from within, foregrounding the piecemeal fine-tuning of the administrative system at the provincial level. We show that every administrative intervention had a spatial element or – to put it differently – created its own spatiality. The province, in that sense, was not a fixed territorial entity, but an amalgamation of spatial properties, depending on the administrative issue at stake.