ABSTRACT
The speeches that accompanied the award of the RIBA Gold Medal to the city of Barcelona, and the recently publicised concerns and recommendations of the Urban Task Force, were quite patently architect-driven: the city is the site of architecture, therefore the city is good and the periphery is bad – culturally and environmentally. This may be so, but people in northern hemisphere cities have been voting with their feet for the periphery for 40 years, even though there are now signs of stabilisation.
