To celebrate the 100th birthday of the first person named in the Van Eesteren-Fluck & Van Lohuizen Foundation – urban designer Cornelis van Eesteren (1897-1988) – the EFL Foundation organized a series of affairs dedicated to Van Eesteren. The Cor van Eesteren Event 1997 addressed the fundamentals of urban design and the body of knowledge that underlies the discipline. It included the Van Eesteren Lecture by Professor Dr T. Kreukels and a publication entitled ‘Het idee van de functionele stad / The Idea of the Functional City’. Another feature was ‘Een lezing met lichtbeelden 1928 / A Lecture with Slides 1928’, a symposium directed by the Department of Urban Design at the University of Technology, Delft. The heart of the event was an exhibition that presented a historical overview of the subject. It was accompanied by a publication realized in collaboration with the Netherlands Architecture Institute and NAi Publishers.
The international urban-design exhibition and accompanying book provided an overview of the most important urban plans for major cities throughout the 20th century. Thanks to a network of correspondents, the project included visual and written material collected by a wide variety of researchers. Besides a number of classic examples, they managed to track down and document many international plans never before exhibited, including several from the former Eastern bloc.

• Zuider Zee Project, Cornelis Lely, 1892
• Letchworth First Garden City, 1903
• Lyon Cité Industrielle, 1904
• Berlin: Gross-Berlin, 1910
• Kraków, 1910
• World Centre of Communication, 1912
• Ruhrgebiet Wirtschaftsplan, 1920
• Cologne: Generalsiedlungsplan, 1923
• Rotterdam: General Expansion Plan, 1928
• Eindhoven: General Expansion Plan, 1930
• Amsterdam: General Expansion Plan, 1934
• Paris: Plan d’Aménagement de la Région Parisienne, 1934
• Moscow: General Reconstruction Plan, 1935
• La Ville Radieuse, 1935
• Berlin: Generalbebauungsplan für die Reichshauptstadt, 1938
• London: Greater London Plan, 1944
• Le Havre: Post-War Reconstruction Plan, 1946
• Warsaw: Post-War Reconstruction Plan, 1947
• Berlin: Stalinallee, 1952
• Stockholm: Generalplan för Stockholm, 1952
• Randstad: Development of the West of the Netherlands, 1958
• Paris: La Ville Spatiale, 1959
• Emmen: Structure Plan, 1963
• Lelystad: Urban Plan, 1964
• Paris: Schéma Directeur d’Aménagement et d’Urbanisme de la Région de Paris, 1965
• Milton Keynes, Plan for Milton Keynes, 1970
• Almere: Provisional Structure Plan, 1977