Introduction

Communities live and work in towns and cities; as society changes so does urban form, responding to accommodate change and growth. ‘The city is and has always been throughout the ages at the root of our culture, history, arts and traditions. It has been the birth-place of a society in constant evolution’ (Cravatte 1977:13). For its users, residents and visitors alike, the city becomes a cultural interpretation of the physical environment through personal identification and attachment. In the historic environment there are competing demands and underlying tensions between past and present cultures and between the familiarity of the old and the notion of progress attached to the new. ‘Progress has come to be identified with improvement in quantitative indicators; these concern mainly economic processes, seldom social, hardly ever cultural’ (de Kadt 1990:9).