ABSTRACT
The processes that produce additions to and renewals of the built environment are initiated and carried out by three main sets of interests – profit-seeking private investors, legally defined public authorities, and ‘voluntary’ organisations, groups or individuals. Nearly all initiators, or promoters, of built forms are readily classifiable into one of these groups, although definitional problems can arise. The aim of this chapter is to present a model which disaggregates the production process, identifies the various types of organisations and institutions engaged in it and differentiates those that are democratically accountable from those that are not. A later chapter (Chapter 9) assesses the negative change that occurred over the period 1978-90 in the ratio of democratic to non-democratic input into the process. That chapter goes on to analyse changes in the ‘mix’ of output of new built environment produced over this period of de-democratisation – roughly the period during which ‘neo-liberal’ Conservative administrations held power.
