ABSTRACT
Critics who saw New Labour’s 1999 urban renaissance vision as just the ‘predictable outcome of a report by a group of metropolitan designer luvvies’ may have missed the point about design (Crookston 2001: 90) but they were onto something about metropolitan bias. The Urban Task Force (UTF) was certainly London-centric. Almost all its members lived in the capital enjoying the advantages of a compact connected city on a daily basis. Their faith in the city as a place of aspiration, which people with choice will choose for living, leisure and work, reflected the realities of social geography in London as nowhere else.
