Otto Saumarez Smith

Surprisingly compelling reading if you're interested in the subject - I read it all in one day. It's quite short (~170 pages of text) so there's a lot it doesn't cover. It's very specifically about the 1960-1965 period where massive "urban renewal" projects to rip up entire town centres were in vogue and had both radical and government support, both Tory and Labour, and tries to go into how these projects were sold, the reasons it was seen as necessary, and specific details about a few plans and the lives of the planners millieu they came from. There's a whole chapter specifically looking at Blackburn and quite a bit of detail about schemes in places like Portsmouth in the chapters on 2 specific planners, which also shows a bit on how schemes got scaled down significantly as economic malaise set in and the ideas of endless prosperity and growth faded. There's a lot of interesting detail - I think in general it's fascinating how the car was seen as inevitable and something you couldn't fight, but also very dangerous to *living*, in traffic accidents, the break up of community, the disruption to urban living. There was a surprising consensus against "suburbanisation" but a lot of the solutions didn't practically succeed and the new modern urban centres set around American-style malls failed to restore "urban life" like the planners assumed - although not helped by schemes being only built in bits and pieces, tearing through old communities and markets but only very slowly building anything back in their place.… (más)