Urban and Regional Planning Fourth edition

Abstract

It is important to stress what this book is and what it is not. It is not a textbook of planning; there are excellent examples of those now available, including especially Barry Cullingworth’s classic Town and Country Planning in Britain (13th edition, with Vincent Nadin; Routledge, 2001). Rather, it is an introduction to planning, written both for the beginning student and for the general reader. I hope that it will be found useful by students of applied geography and of town and country planning; by university and college students concerned to fit modern planning into its historical context; and by a wider audience which may want to know how planning has evolved. Two points must be made about the treatment. First, it is deliberately historical; it traces the evolution of urban and regional problems, and of planning philosophies, techniques and legislation, from the Industrial Revolution to the present day. Second, it is necessarily written from a British standpoint for a British readership (though I hope that readers from other Commonwealth countries will find it relevant). Throughout most of the book the exclusive emphasis is on the British experience, though the survey of early planning thought in Chapter 2 is international, and Chapters 7 and 8 deliberately range out to compare the experience of other advanced industrial countries. Even in those chapters the comparison deliberately excludes the developing world; doubtless, another useful book is to be written there, but there is no space in this book to do the subject justice. The book is a by-product of thirty years of lectures on introductory applied geography and planning at the London School of Economics, the University of Reading, the University of California at Berkeley, and latterly at University College London. I am grateful to successive waves of students who endured these courses and who unfailingly, by their reactions, indicated the places where material was boring or unintelligible. More particularly, I remain indebted to two academic colleagues and friends, both sadly now deceased: to Brian McLoughlin for his characteristically generous and thoughtful comments on a first draft; and to Marion Clawson for bringing his immense experience to bear on the account in Chapter 8. I must add the usual disclaimer: that I am solely responsible for errors and omissions. To two devoted helpers – my secretaries, Monika Wheeler and Rosa Husain, who typed two successive versions of the manuscript meticulously despite unnaturally heavy departmental burdens, and my cartographer, Kathleen King – I offer my best thanks. (I must also reflect, in this fourth edition, that the personal computer is relieving them and their successors from further such burdens.) Lastly, I rededicate this book to my wife Magda for her imperturbable patience in the face of gross provocation. I hope that she will find the result some small recompens