This site is devoted to exploring how the UK could move forwards from its present crisis of housing and planning, not backwards to the monster which our country had developed in the last three decades. The monster was unjust, inefficient, crisis-provoking and ecologically unsustainable.
Those forms of city and dwelling are discredited and the opportunity exists for some fundamental changes, without which the growth of inequalities and the impending petroleum / emissions problems will surely bring the next crisis nearer.
The site forms part of a research project being undertaken by Michael Edwards and Bob Colenutt, with support through Emeritus Fellowships from the Leverhulme Foundation. The views expressed here are not those of the Foundation, of course, nor of the universities in which we work.
In the coming months we shall be exposing here the drafts of work on the project, floating ideas for discussion and hoping for comments and inputs – all of which we shall acknowledge. The task is a daunting one and needs a lot of collective thought.
The site launches on the UK’s general election day. It’s not clear what sort of government we might have after today. But whatever happens it will not get easier to challenge the neo-liberal orthodoxy which has infested all three of our main political parties, to varying degrees. It may get even harder than it has recently been. [ Later - 7 May - things do indeed look bad. ]
