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 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 National Planning Policy Framework signally fails to provide.

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.

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.

About the Author:

David Williams has spent a lifetime working happily in planning, economic development and regeneration, first with Liverpool and Bexley councils, then with the Civic Trust Regeneration Unit. Finally, in 1997, he set up a community planning consultancy, Tellus 42, working with councils, chambers and regeneration partnerships, council estates, town centres and inner neighbourhoods, community groups and charities. In Civilizing Cities, part 1 shows how cities function and grow, and how, since about 1900, density has given way to sprawl. Part 2 discusses the loss of diversity, also since 1900, through retail sheds, globalization, road traffic and social ghettoes. Part 3 concludes by setting an agenda for city revival through a new pragmatic theory for planning, a comprehensive outline of what sustainable development actually means and, last, how to restore the balance between local and central government and involve citizens in that process. In short, restoring local democracy.

Author: David Williams
Release date: February 2021
Format: Paperback, 407 pages
Availability: Available from all good bookshops. For wholesalers via Gardners or direct from the publisher.
Paperback ISBN: 978-1911593799
ASIN: B08WX6Y4DD
Paperback Price: £18.99
BIC: JFSG, JFCD, JPP, JFSC, JKS, JPR.