ABSTRACT
Since the advent of Richard Rogers’s Task Force Report in 1999 (DETR 1999), a great deal of good has happened in our towns and cities. A cursory look at nearly any city skyline today reveals a plethora of cranes signalling a rush of construction which aims to regenerate neglected city quarters, often removing or reinventing now obsolete industrial usage and creating smart residential, retail, leisure and commercial attractions to repopulate urban areas. In far less than a decade many urban centres have been, and continue to be, literally transformed by this process. To the good, thanks to Rogers and his collaborators, we now know that ‘quality of place’ and its role in sustaining fulfilled lives matters to processes of urban regeneration just as much (if not more) than economic prosperity, functionality, etc. The jury is probably still out in terms of a full determination of what quality of place really means in this context, but Rogers has helped make it pretty clear that design, as well as economic, social and cultural factors, for instance, is key to its achievement. It must be a kind of design, however, that gives special attention to the needs, aspirations and experiences of urban inhabitants instead of just the kind that aims for superficial aesthetic goals.
