Overview

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.

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9780415844444

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'Alison Ravetz has written an epitaph to contemporary planning theory and building technology and anyone remotely concerned with these professions is unlikely to sleep peacefully again after reading her indictment' New Scientist 'It is with a sense of admiration and no little relief that one reads Alison Ravetz's work about the remaking of the British urban environment. With this book she has confirmd her earlier reputation of a careful scholar, a sharp observer and meticulous writer; her book is penetrating, balanced and richly rewarding. It is a trenchant criticism of things gone wrong, but finally creative rather than destructive' - Built Environment '... a highly original and thought-provoking text and one which furthers our understanding of planning in a most useful way' - Planning '... a remarkably lucid and well-organised history, illuminated and extraordinary nuggets of illustration from what planners and politicians actually said at the time ... The book is highly recommended, it is eminently readable, and it deserves to be read widely by students and practitioners of planning' - Town and Country Planning 'As a critique of what has been happening to the built environment since the last war this is one of the best books I have encountered: readable, suitably synoptic and devastatingly accurate in its analysis ... It ought to be required reading in the redoubts of the planning and architectural professions' - Municipal Journal

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Alison Ravetz

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