Werner Hegemann (June 15, 1881 – April 12, 1936) was a city planner, architecture critic, and political writer in Germany's Weimar Republic.

[2] The exhibition aroused great interest and was reprised in refocused form in Düsseldorf; Hegemann wrote an article about it for a general audience and a two-volume official book.

In 1931 he made a lecture tour through South America, visiting Argentina, where he attended a local convention on urban planning at Mar del Plata.

[8] In February 1933, a few weeks after Hitler took power and contemporaneously with the Reichstag Fire, Hegemann published Entlarvte Geschichte ("Unmasked History"), a book critically and sarcastically questioning the origins of and role models for the Nazi Party.

"[9] After several months in Geneva and France, Hegemann was invited by Alvin Johnson to teach urban planning at The New School for Social Research in New York City beginning in November 1933.

Hegemann's early years in the United States, along with his strong education and broad interests, made him an intermediary between city planners and architects throughout Europe and on both sides of the Atlantic.

[12] However, his emphasis on urban planning rather than purely formal considerations and possibly his having not been present during the development in Europe of the Modern Movement in architecture put him at odds with modernists.

For example, in 1929 he was forced to retract an accusation that Martin Wagner's primary activity as chief of city planning for Berlin was funneling architectural commissions to extremist friends,[13] and he labeled Le Corbusier's Ville Contemporaine project for transforming Paris "only vieux jeu" (old hat), sarcastically predicting that it was likely to be realized, [not] because [the skyscrapers] are desirable, healthy, beautiful, and reasonable from the perspective of urban planning but because they are theatrical, romantic, unreasonable, and generally harmful, and because it is part of the money-making activities of a metropolis, in what is literally the world's most international city, Paris, to serve the need for sensation and the vices of native and imported fools.

In 1931 he made a lecture tour through South America, visiting Argentina, where he attended a local convention on urban planning at Mar del Plata.

While bed-ridden at Doctors Hospital he worked on his last book, the three-volume City Planning, Housing, intended to supplement and update The American Vitruvius.