Sociable cities. The 21st-century reinvention of the garden city. 2nd. ed.

Abstract

Closely following the argument of Good Cities, Better Lives: How Europe discovered the Lost Art of Urbanism (Routledge 2013), to which this book is designed as a companion - the author argues in the 2nd. edition of "sociable cities" that the central message is now even stronger: we need more planning, not less. And this planning needs to be driven by broad, high-level strategic visions - national, regional - of the kind of country we want to see. Above all, he shows in the concluding chapters, Britain's escalating housing crisis can be resolved only by a massive programme of planned decentralization from London, at least equal in scale to the great Abercrombie plan seventy years ago. He sets out a picture of great new city clusters at the periphery of South East England, sustainably self-sufficient in their daily patterns of living and working, but linked to the capital by new high-speed rail services.