1st Edition
Remaking Cities (Routledge Revivals) Contradictions of the Recent Urban Environment
This book, published in 1980, is an iconoclastic account of one of the pillars of the welfare state, British town and country planning, between 1945 and 1975. Always a fine balance between central control and market forces, it was challenged by strains within and between the environmental professions and protest by people dispossessed or alienated by re-shaped urban environments. Remaking Cities critiques the export of western-style planning to the developing world and reviews initiatives rooted in different understandings of ‘growth’ appearing in those years.
Nearly forty years on, many of the same issues beset us, notably the depressingly familiar inner city problem, despite countless reports, funds and ‘programmes’. But now our infrastructure and services, once publicly owned, are privatised and fragmented, and local government progressively relegated. The very core of planning, development control, is being pared in a struggle to regain the ‘growth’ which led to our current crisis. This gives fresh importance to the need for new modes of creating liveable, sustainable environments, emphasised in this important work.
Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Part I: The Creation of a Style of Planning 1. Phoenix Rising: the Creation of Statutory Planning in the 1940s 2. Principles and Images of Statutory Planning: the Inevitability of the Style; Part II: The Application of the Style: the Segregated City 3. The Failure of the 1940s Planning System: the Contradiction of Land Values and Development 4. Restructuring the City in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s: the Parameters 5. The Segregated City; Part III: Agents and Agencies of the Built Environment 6. The Technology of the Built Environment: the Crisis in Building After 1945 7. Controlling the Environment: the Environmental Professions and Their Crises 8. The Export of Planning: Western Planning in the Ex-colonial World 9. Experiencing the Environment: People, Place and Space; Conclusions to Parts Two and Three: Criticism of a Style of Planning: the Transition to a New Consciousness; Part IV: Cities in Crisis: Coping with the Contradictions 10 The Urban Crisis, the Planning Crisis, and Alternatives to Development 11. Coping with the Contradictions: the World in a New Light; Bibliography; Index
Biography
Alison Ravetz
