Martin Wagner (1885-1957) was a leading city planner of the Weimar Republic, chief planner for Greater Berlin (1926 to 1933), planning theorist, and mastermind of social housing ventures. Relocating in 1938 to the United States, where he taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Wagner promoted a conception of planning shaped by his experiences in the nascent German social democratic welfare state. His ideas then evolved in the context of the regulatory and interventionist policies of American New Deal and wartime mobilization. In both Germany and the US, Wagner’s approach to planning was in dialogue with economics science, in its role as instrument and shaper of territorial governance.
His 1915 doctoral dissertation co-advised by economist Julius Wolf, Wagner went on to develop a concept of the city as financial organism, situated in a regional framework subject to managerial governance. His ideas were built on the structural overlap in the systems of market and political organization theorized by German thinkers such as Max Weber, Werner Sombart, and Rudolf Hilferding. As planning practitioner, he extended to urban territory forms of public-private interplay that defined the Weimar “social economy.” In dialogue with American Keynesian economists, including Alvin Hansen, Wagner would elaborate his approach to the urban fabric as reified fiscal policy. However, his regulatory conception of real estate and advocacy of public land ownership ultimately condemned his theses to obscurity in postwar America.
