ABSTRACT
In our account of Holford’s years in Italy we saw how his interest in ‘urbanism’ originated in an interest in the context of the individual building. The broader concern expanded subsequently to embrace many varieties and different scales of spatial planning, some of which lacked any architectural element at all. He came to advocate (or at least to accept for the purposes of argument) the view that there was such a thing as a discrete expertise in ‘town planning’, whose principal object was the right use and development of land. Yet while others stressed this separateness of town planning, Holford returned again and again to the ‘urbanism’ of his youth, in which all the relevant arts and sciences were married in the physical and social regeneration of towns.
