ABSTRACT
The forces shaping the contemporary city have not been simply economic, though economic factors have played an important part in, for example, deregularising urban planning at local and national levels (King: 1987). Utopian city developments began to lose credibility in the 1960s (Soja: 1989, 182), partly as a consequence of the urban riots in the United States, France and Italy, the declining urban populations and all-too-evident urban degeneration. ‘[B]y the mid-1970s planning had reached the stage of a “paradigm crisis”’ (Hall: 1996, 334).7
