The Reconceptualization of the City’s Ugliness Between the 1950s and 1970s in the British, Italian, and Australian Milieus

The paper examines the reorientations of the appreciation of ugliness within different national contexts in a comparative or relational frame, juxtaposing the British, Italian, and Australian milieus, and to relate them to the ways in which the transformation of the urban fabric and the effect of suburbanization were perceived in the aforementioned national contexts. Special attention is paid to the production and dissemination of the ways the city’s uglification was conceptualized between the 1950s and 1970s. Pivotal for the issues that this paper addresses are Ian Nairn’s Outrage: On the Disfigurement of Town and Countryside (1956) Robin Boyd’s Australian Ugliness (1960), and the way the phenomenon of urban expansion is treated in these books in comparison with other books from the four national contexts under study, such as Ludovico Quaroni’s La torre di Babele (1967) and Reyner Banham’s The New Brutalism: Ethic Or Aesthetic? (1966).