ABSTRACT
Though the character of city regions and their political context have changed dramatically over the last century, the aims of Western governments, with the exception of one brief period in the 1960s, have remained remarkably constant. None the less there has been an ongoing debate between two ways of thinking about city regions: between various “radical” models which have wanted to see the city region as a new type of human settlement and a “conservative” model which wanted to retain much of the earlier integrity of city regions as hierarchies of relatively free-standing and self-sufficient settlements clustered around a major urban core; the dominant paradigm. It is a complex ongoing debate and each of us has taken different sides of it in our time. Previously, the debate was much more heated in Europe than in the United States, where, until recently, the issue of the social or built form of regions has not generated much interest. In the United States each local community has spread at will and there was no strong pattern of existing local centers to be engulfed or protected. Today all this has changed and regional “growth management” has become a major public preoccupation in the United States.
