ABSTRACT
At the end of Chapter 4 we summarized some of the chief features of the elaborate
planning system set up in Britain just after the Second World War. We saw that, essen -
tially, the system was designed for an economy where the bulk of urban development
and redevelopment would be carried out by public agencies – a far cry indeed from the
actual world of the twenty-first century. We saw too that an essential function of the
system was to control and regulate the pace and direction of change – social, economic
and physical. It was assumed that control of change was both feasible and desirable:
feasible, because the pace of population growth and of economic development was
expected to be slow, and also because new and effective powers would be taken to
control the regional balance of new industrial employment; desirable, because decision-
makers generally shared the Barlow hypothesis that uncontrolled change before the war
had produced undesirable results. Furthermore, we noticed that the administrative
responsibility for operating the new system was lodged not in central government but
in the existing units of local government, with only a degree of central monitoring. The
system thus created was from the beginning more powerful on its negative side than
on the side of positive initiative.
