Remaking Cities (Routledge Revivals)

'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

• 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