ABSTRACT
The idea that the unwanted side effects of urbanization processes can be mitigated or prevented by the design of buildings, streets, neighbourhoods and even entire towns and cities has a long history. It is an idea that has been given shape by remarkably few key concepts, all stemming from the rationalism of modernity (Madanipour 2007). These concepts have influenced successive phases of urban development in the cause of the economic efficiency, social stability and the enchantment of consumers that is necessary to urban order and to sustained capital accumulation and circulation. The common denominators, in the evolving canon of architecture, planning and urban studies, have been overwhelmingly prescriptive and deterministic, often involving a raw environmental determinism and the
privileging of spatial form over social process. In some cases (such as the urban renewal programmes of the 1960s and 1970s), the evangelism and environmental determinism of planners and urban designers has led them to pursue ‘bureaucratic offensives’ with negative consequences.
