ABSTRACT
The starting point of this book was the English anxiety about the urban. It has been principally about ideas expressed in architectural discourse, ideas which have, as has been shown, a variable relationship with observable reality. Anxiety about the urban is expressed in various places: in the observable facts of de-industrialisation and de-urbanisation in the great cities of the north of England; in the less observable, but still widely felt, degradation of the existing public realm; in a vague feeling, a source of much journalistic angst, that the streets and squares and parks of England are becoming ever more decayed, ever more threatened, ever more compromised by traffic and violence. As we have seen, anxiety is clearly represented in architectural and other writings; in, above all, the pronouncements of Richard Rogers, who regrets the loss of ‘civility’ in present day London, the quality that brought his parents to the city half a century previously (Rogers 1997: 105); his later report for the British government’s Urban Task Force describes traumatic urban conditions, in which English cities appear primitive and uncivilised by comparison with their European counterparts. Anxiety is strongly present in the writings of Jane Jacobs, still influential forty years after their publication (Jacobs 1962). It is present too in the work of Jacobs’ contemporaries Kevin Lynch, Marshal Berman, Richard Sennett; in the statements of Norman Foster about his plans for Trafalgar Square; in the architectural polemics of Peter Rowe, Ken Worpole, Joseph Rykwert, Roger Scruton and even HRH Prince Charles. These are a few of the sources that have been frequently referred to here.
