ABSTRACT
At the end of Chapter 4 I summarized some of the chief features of the elaborate planning system set up in Britain just after the Second World War. We saw that essentially the system was designed for an economy in which the bulk of urban development and redevelopment would be carried out by public agencies – a far cry indeed from the actual world of the 1990s. We saw too that an essential function of the system was to control and regulate the pace and direction of change – social, economic and physical. It was assumed that control of change was both feasible and desirable: feasible, because the pace of population growth and of economic development was expected to be slow, and also because new and effective powers would be taken to control the regional balance of new industrial employment; desirable, because decision-makers generally shared the Barlow hypothesis that uncontrolled change before the war had produced undesirable results. Furthermore, we noticed that the administrative responsibility for operating the new system was lodged not in central government but in the existing units of local government, with only a degree of central monitoring. The system thus created was from the beginning more powerful on its negative side than on the side of positive initiative.
