ABSTRACT
Planners and architects, as the chief designers of our physical environment, should never forget that the most important thing about a city or town is the people. The city is essentially a stage for diverse human activity, and a physical environment reflects, often in a subtle way, the character and qualities of its inhabitants. Later it may condition them, but in the first place somebody must pay the piper to call some tune. The urban designer, in endeavouring to project a vision that is not just his own subjective idea of tomorrow but is something that will provide for the varied physical and emotional needs of all the citizens, needs some kind of brief in terms of a human specification, not perhaps in terms of cwhat do people want?’ as they tend to like what they know. The public generally tend to see possibilities of a new environment in the limited terms of curing the deficiencies of their present one; and the urban designer has the difficult task of suggesting what they did not know they could have. But there are a number of fairly obvious things on which generally an acceptance may be secured.
