Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism

<p>Non-Plan explores ways of involving people in the design of their environments - a goal which transgresses political categories of 'right' and 'left'. Attempts to circumvent planning bureaucracy and architectural inertia have ranged from free-market enterprise zones to self-build housing and from squatting to sophisticated technologies of prefabrication. Yet all have shared in a desire to let people shape the built environment they want to live and work in.<br><br>How can buildings better reflect the needs of their inhabitants? How can cities better facilitate the work and recreation of their many populaces? Modernism had promised a functionalist approach to resolving the architectural needs of the twentieth-century yet the design of cities and buildings often appears to confound the needs of those who use them - their design and layout being highly regulated by restrictive legislation planning controls and bureaucracy.<br><br>Non-Plan considers the theoretical and conceptual frameworks within which architecture and urbanism have sought to challenge entrenched boundaries of control focusing on the architectural history of the post-war period to the present day. This provocative book will be of interest to architects planners and students of architecture design town-planning and architectural history. Its contributors include architects critics and historians including many whose work helped shape the Non-Plan debate during the period. <br><br><br>List of contributors: Cedric Price Benjamin Franks Elizabeth Lebas Eleonore Kofman Ben Highmore Yona Friedman Paul Barker Clara Greed Barry Curtis Colin Ward Ian Horton John Beck Chinedu Umenyilora and Malcolm Miles.</p>