The Right to Live in the City: Some Thoughts and Suggestions on Town Planning's Contribution in the United Kingdom

Abstract

From the 1940s to the early 1970s there was a dominating and pervasive set of town planning policies and practices that instigated and promoted decentralization and dispersal from Britain's major cities. These policies and practices were partially reversed in the mid-1970s but were never comprehensively repudiated. Nor were adequate measures put in place to try to ensure that people and economic and other organizations wanting to stay in the cities in reasonable conditions were able to do so. Town planning definitions and policies are offered to this end and some discussion of the theoretical and practical issues involved is entered into.