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Homes, cities and neighbourhoods: planning and the residential landscapes of modern Britain

The aim of this book is to provide a contemporary history of housing in Britain, from the late 19th century to the present, set within the evolution of planning rather than social policy, as has been common in previous accounts. The book provides a history of housing as habitat, as environment, and as a product, rather than as tenure or finance.

The main contribution to knowledge comes from particular chapters. Chapter 3, ‘Two types of planning’, shows how the achievement of a post-1945 vision of a comprehensively planned city was dependent on an idealised model of political and economic planning, but always contained a conflict between short term aims favouring quantity and long term aims favouring quality. Chapter 4 ‘Searching for an alternative’ documents how, in the 1960s, the post 1945 model broke down through a reaction against the techniques of mass slum clearance, a search for alternative visions of the future based on open-ended, flexible cities and a realisation of persistent problems of urban decline. Chapter 6 ‘Quality and quantity’ documents how the quality/quantity conflict has become displaced from the public sector to the private sector and has also started to encompass environmental quality issues. This chapter also shows how from about 1995 to 2007, private developers started to diversify their product, away from a former, overwhelming reliance on single family houses. Finally, Chapter 7 ‘Urban Design and the Environment’ includes a discussion of how a trend towards higher residential densities in the same period, from about 1995 to 2007, was a product of both planning policy and the market, rather than planning alone. The trend had, however, continued to a point where density levels raise issues of consumer satisfaction, especially for households with children.