ABSTRACT
The notion that urban communities could be created through the spatial arrangement of dwellings and amenities was deeply entrenched in the thinking and practice of British urban planning in the late interwar period through the 1940s. In 1944, the Study Group of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning argued that urban planners had to (re)create a ‘sense of neighbourhood’ through their spatial interventions. 2 Allegedly this ‘sense’ had been lost due to the irresistible process of urban aggrandizement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and particularly during the economic hardship of the 1930s. And now, as the war approached its end, the task of generating ‘community spirit’ through spatial planning was considered to be particularly urgent for Britain’s bombed-out cities. As these cities were about to undergo their physical, economic and social reconstruction, British planning authorities, administrators and scholars aimed to achieve a malleable ‘social balance’ so that ‘community spirit’ would emerge improved and redeveloped in the post-war era.
