Civilizing Cities

<p>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. <em>Civilizing Cities</em> expands considerably from these foundations in three parts: past present and future.          </p><p>         To improve cities 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 <em>National Planning Policy Framework </em>signally fails to provide. </p><p>         For this 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. </p><p>         Finally the book briefly surveys the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the need to devolve more powers to local councils covering education health transport and welfare etc. Planning must also return to its roots in public health and create healthier cities with less pollution inequality unemployment and isolation. </p><p><br></p>