ABSTRACT
This book, published in 1980, is an iconoclastic account of one of the pillars of the welfare state, British town and country planning, between 1945 and 1975. Always a fine balance between central control and market forces, it was challenged by strains within and between the environmental professions and protest by people dispossessed or alienated by re-shaped urban environments. Remaking Cities critiques the export of western-style planning to the developing world and reviews initiatives rooted in different understandings of ‘growth’ appearing in those years.
Nearly forty years on, many of the same issues beset us, notably the depressingly familiar inner city problem, despite countless reports, funds and ‘programmes’. But now our infrastructure and services, once publicly owned, are privatised and fragmented, and local government progressively relegated. The very core of planning, development control, is being pared in a struggle to regain the ‘growth’ which led to our current crisis. This gives fresh importance to the need for new modes of creating liveable, sustainable environments, emphasised in this important work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |4 pages
Introduction
part One|43 pages
The Creation of a Style of Planning
chapter 1|24 pages
Phoenix Rising: The Creation of Statutory Planning in the 1940s
part Two|99 pages
The Application of the Style: The Segregated City
chapter 4|24 pages
Restructuring the City in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s: The Parameters
chapter 5|38 pages
The Segregated City
part Three|145 pages
Agents and Agencies of the Built Environment
chapter 8|28 pages
The Export of Planning: Western Planning in the Ex-Colonial World
chapter 9|38 pages
Experiencing the Environment: People, Place and Space
part Four|42 pages
Cities in Crisis: Coping with the Contradictions