INTRODUCTION

For many years the Joint Centre for Urban Design

has worked with the broad intention of making better
places better places than those otherwise produced
by the modern development industry and better
places for everybody.
Much of the argument that has sustained this
approach has been most clearly articulated in the
book Responsive Environments (Bentley et al., 1985).
Much of this argument is based on the idea that only one
specific configuration of urban development provides
support for the widest range of activities. This notion of
urban form is sustained by a potentially safe public
realm which defines clear boundaries with the private
realm. At its simplest: gridded streets and perimeter
buildings designed to support a wide mix of uses.
Responsive Environments has been a hugely successful
book. A lively critique of the broad concepts and the
detail of the propositions contained within it has
continued both publicly and within the Centre.
Much of this has focused on assertion and counterassertion about how essentially monotonous or rich
and exciting such development may be; about how
traditional or stultifying the approach may be; about
how appropriate the approach is for modern traffic
requirements; about how realistically such an
approach may satisfy the demands of the market;
about how such an approach can be sustained in the
face of an international tide of urban dispersal.
Much of this volume inter alia answers these chal
lenges. The authors of Responsive Environments have
naturally developed their own thinking in the inter
vening years and their colleagues represented here
continue to support, challenge and extend these ideas
both with their own critique and the focus of their
own particular interests. Many colleagues were or are
students at the Joint Centre and their investment in
the ideas presented here has been substantial.

As urban designers most of us perceive that we

have a powerful vested interest in concepts of place,
supported by local groups who can find and wield
adequate power and resources to keep us in business.
By simple extension, we have a similar interest in
helping such groups to identify and marshal those
powers and resources. In so doing, we subscribe to
ideas of local legitimacy. To a greater or lesser extent
we challenge other ideas of power and legitimacy
from the priorities of established local democracy to
those of central government agencies and the domi
nant powers of the market economy. So what? At
least we should recognise the place in the radical
Utopian tradition of what we are doing, and we
should avoid complacency with our real achieve
ments as enablers in a context that moves ever more
powerfully in other directions.
Urban design at the Joint Centre has long allied
itself with democracy and that even more dubious
quality of life: pluralism. Where the latter sits in
relation to hegemony, and how urban interest groups
might create or recreate places to support such living
virtues where they have all but withered or been
constrained by other interests, is a matter we will
have to deal with.
For those able to read the indications, the built
environment has always given concrete manifestation
to power structures that have driven its develop
ment. W e commonly refer to simple manifestations:
the dominance of the gothic cathedral above the
huddle of the temporal city; the radiating militaristic
enfilades of the baroque city. Yet the reality of most
urban environments is naturally a more subtle
palimpsest of power built, reformed and re-built.
Daunton (1984) and others have shown how the pre
vailing orthodoxy has ousted unwelcome heterodoxies
from urban places: the warrens of the nineteenth

Introduction

century poor, so graphically

fictionalised
by
Disraeli and Dickens which are remotely like the
barriadas and squatter settlements of the twentieth
century developing world, with their sub-culture of
the court, alley and street, were soon swept away by
the municipal grid-irons of health and social secur
ity. The places of the people, whether residential,
industrial, commercial, or places of public assembly,
have thus ever been controlled for the public good or
otherwise, according to the will of the prevailing
power hierarchies.
Despite this, communities have long maintained a
healthy entente with the emissaries of more central

power. As described by Weber (1958) and more

poignantly for the urban designer, by Jacobs (1961),
mixed communities of interest bound by propinquity
have put place and the exchanges of the daily and
yearly round above mere power legislation.
W e hope that the chapters that follow raise as
many questions as they answer. W r i t t e n by those of
us who currently have some passing tenure in the
Joint Centre, they are offered to all of those with an
interest in urban design, but particularly to those
who over the last twenty-one years have been here
and formed ideas that have gone out across the world
to be restated, renegotiated and reformed.