ABSTRACT
On various occasions, the literary critic Northrop Frye, whose life-work was devoted to the interrogation of 'myths and models', drew upon a memorable window image to describe the human condition, expressed in the opening passage of a 1980 lecture. When illusions are stripped away to reveal stark reality, its application to the field of urban planning can be seen in the crisis years of the 1960s and 1970s. When a window opened on social movements, community activism and public participation to reveal inherent contradictions in the urban project. Three dimensions of urban planning—the analytic debate ('what is city planning?'); the urban form debate ('what is a good city plan?'); and the procedural debate ('what is a good planning process?') were set against a time line stretching from the mid-nineteenth century to the post-modern era. By the early 1970s, opposition to large-scale urban redevelopment, in all its forms, had gathered force.
