David Williams

Civilizing Cities David Williams First edition

Cities affect all our lives. Fernand Braudel identified their three functions,providing security,shelter and markets. Ideologists like Ebenezer Howard (garden cities) and Le Corbusier (monumental redevelopment) suggested how cities should work. Jane Jacobs showed how they actually work. Civilizing Cities expands considerably from these foundations in three parts: past, present and future. To address these issues, we need to replace 'normative' and 'market-led' planning ideologies based on the bulldozer, with pragmatic planning based on small-scale incrementalism and 'intensification'. We also need practical sustainable policies, which the National Planning Policy Framework signally fails to provide. Finally, we need politicians with the intellectual rigour, social understanding and felt need for fairness, like Clement Attlee, Lloyd George and, in Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain. He or she will need to reset the balance between central and local government, make taxes more consistent (a bedroom tax just on the poor?) and reform the House of Lords as a Citizens Assembly. The book concludes with conclusions to be drawn from the Covid-19 pandemic. These include giving local councils many more essential public functions in the prevention and management of future health crises, returning planning to its public health roots and creating healthier cities with less pollution, inequality, unemployment and isolation.