ABSTRACT
The extent to which conscious and deliberate planning has influenced and informed the location and provision of cultural facilities is a function of both the control of landuse and building-whether development is dictated by state or other power groups (e.g. Church, Crown or ‘tribe’) or a system of democratic consensus-and the place that the arts have in a particular society or community and therefore in the planning for human settlements. This book is neither a treatise on urban design and morphology through the ages nor a social historical account of ‘culture’ or its specific manifestations and building types, although both are touched upon in assessing the evolving relationships between urban and city planning and cultural amenity and development. Applying industrial, neo-Marxist and post-industrial (e.g. globalisation) theory and modern notions of political economy and the public realm to the pre-industrial past is dangerous and ultimately fruitless, whilst cross-cultural comparatives also suffer from both Eurocentricism and retrospective universalism, not least in the realm of ‘culture’ (Aitchison 1992, Schuster 1996). How past societies planned for public culture and the place of amenities within the development of cities does however offer particular insights to the inherited attitudes and paradigms of succeeding periods and societies. Arguably the ‘classical’ approach to urban design and the consideration and location of monumental and popular cultural forms provides a distinct example of continuity and change in the formation of cities and urban culture. This continuity and change in Kevin Lynch’s view is needed so that the comfort of the past may anchor the future (1972).
