In a time when urbanism was mostly viewed from a technical and legal perspective, French art and architecture critic Françoise Choay offered a reflection on the modern city through the lens of theoretical discourse. Organising heterogenous ideas from various disciplines in ideological currents, such as progressism, culturalism, anti-urbanism, and naturalism, she pointed to the necessity to free architecture and planning from rigid formulas, from nostalgic models, or from the illusion of progress. Becoming a widely-read scholarly text, the anthology gave access to many seminal texts still not available in French.