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Figure 1.1
Alton West Estate, Roehampton, London,
London County Council Architects’ Department,
1959. Bold versions of Le Corbusier’s Unité
d’Habitation are set in the soft landscape of south
London, creating an image of the modernist dream.
Compare this image with Figure 1.4.
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CHAPTER ONE
●
PARADIGMS LOST AND FOUND
9
of failings in urban renewal and redevelopment
schemes grew to such length and seriousness that
ultimately it was impossible to treat these problems as
teething troubles or poor applications of visionary
ideas by less-talented designers. As urban historian
John Gold has pointed out, a movement predicated
on functionalism as a core belief could not withstand
criticism about its dysfunctional consequences
(Gold, 1997: pp. 4–5).
The conclusion was unavoidable: the ideas them-
selves were seriously flawed. Critic Charles Jencks
famously ascribed the ‘death of modernism’ to the
precise moment of 3.32 p.m. on July 15, 1972, when
high-rise slab blocks in the notorious Pruitt-Igoe
housing project in St. Louis, Missouri were profes-
sionally imploded by the city (Jencks, 1977: p. 9).
Completed as recently as 1955, the buildings had
been abandoned and vandalized by their erstwhile
inhabitants to a degree that made them uninhabitable.
Earlier, in 1968, a gas explosion and the consequent
partial collapse of another high-rise block at Ronan
Point in east London severely eroded the British
public’s confidence in the safety of modernist high-
rise residential construction.
The tensions of urban life burst into the open dur-
ing the British urban riots of the 1980s. Like their
American precedents in the 1960s, the riots were the
product of a clash between mainstream white culture
and a black subculture built on deprivation and
disadvantage, and were mainly focused on older
urban areas of concentrated poverty, such as Toxteth
in Liverpool, Moss Side in Manchester, Handsworth
in Birmingham and Brixton in south London. The
unrest and violence reached spectacular levels with
the Broadwater Farm conflagration in Tottenham,
north London, in 1985, and this was significantly
different from the other urban areas of racial tension.
Broadwater Farm was a ‘prizewinning urban renewal
project of 1970, (which) had proved a case study of
indefensible space; its medium-rise blocks, rising
from a pedestrian deck above ground-level parking,
provided a laboratory culture for vandalism and
crime’ (Hall, 2002: p. 464).
There were several influential efforts to link this
urban unrest directly to the failures of modern archi-
tecture and planning (e.g. Coleman, 1985). Although
the social, racial and economic situation in 1980s
Britain that bred the riots was far more complex than
the cause-and-effect argument about the physical
environment, the simplistic connection was a com-
pelling one in the public mind. It was easier to blame
the architecture than to deal with the deep-seated
problems of social inequity and racial tension. With
the hacking to death of a British policeman at
Broadwater Farm and hundreds of riot police assailed
by fire bombs, the tragic modernist blocks came to
stand, like Pruitt-Igoe before them, for everything
bad with modernist city planning and architecture.
Thus, what were truths for one generation quickly
became doubts and finally anathema to the next.
Faced with this ideological void, the younger genera-
tion of architects and planners sought to construct a
new set of beliefs, and several premises of modernist
urbanism were radically overhauled, and in many
cases overturned. Many aspects of the search for new
concepts focused around the recovery of more
human-scaled spaces and an architectural vocabulary
that connected with public taste. As we discuss more
fully in Chapter 3, early postmodern architecture in
the USA during the 1970s and 1980s incorporated
ornamental classical details and elements of pop
culture in an effort to bridge the communication gap
between architects and the public. In the UK, this
trend to glitzy ornamentation was also present, but a
more substantive move was a return to an appreciation
of vernacular building types and traditional urban
settings. Just as the inclusion of ornament and kitsch
into postmodern architecture was a conscious viola-
tion of modernist principles – a definitive rejection of
the reductive, abstract aesthetics that had ruled
professional taste for several decades – postmodern
urbanism resurrected the traditional street, identified
in modernist thinking as the villain and cause of
urban squalor.
This renewed appreciation of traditional urban
forms was presaged by Jane Jacobs in her landmark
book 
The Death and Life of American Cities
( Jacobs,
1962). Her description of the vitality and life on the
streets of her New York neighborhood contrasted
poignantly with the crime and grime of the urban
wastelands produced by urban renewal, and while her
criticism of modernist planning and architecture was
largely dismissed by professionals during the 1960s,
by the 1980s her book had become a standard 
text within this developing counter-narrative. Le
Corbusier soon became the arch-villain of the new
history, with his revolutionary and draconian propo-
sals for ‘The City of Tomorrow’ identified as the
source of everything bad about modernist urbanism
(see Figure 1.2). Like countless other urban design
professionals caught in the midst of this great revision
of architectural and planning ideology over the last 
30 years, we (the authors) have often promoted
our ideas of traditional urban form and space by
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DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
10
contrasting them with a ‘conveniently adverse picture
of modernism’ and its failings (Gold, p. 8).
In developing the new, improved grand narrative
of postmodern city design during the 1970s and
1980s, professionals turned to smaller scale opportu-
nities instead of striving for new social and physical
utopias. Architects started taking note of what was
already in place and sought to enhance the urban fab-
ric rather than erase it. The study of history and con-
text became important again, and designers focused 
on ‘human-scaled’ development, with a particular
emphasis on the creation of defined public spaces,
often taking the form of streets and squares, as
settings for a reinvigorated public life.
Our wholesale abandonment of modernist
principles and their replacement by a radical return
to premodern ideas poses something of a dilemma.
Based on the belief that modernist architects and
planners made serious errors about many aspects of
city planning and design, we tell ourselves we won’t
repeat the same mistakes, and consider our ideas
much more appropriate to the task of city design.
Here in America, our working concepts are based
on traditional values of walkable urban places
instead of the car-dominated asphalt deserts
produced in the search for a drive-in utopia. We pro-
mote mixing uses once again, where for five decades
functions were rigidly segregated, and we seek to
involve the public directly in the making of plans
instead of drawing them in the splendid isolation of
city halls or corporate offices. We feel certain that
these ideas are the right ones for the task of repair-
ing the city and advancing the cause of a sustainable
urban future.
But how can we be sure? After all, the modernist
architects and planners we now criticize so harshly
felt a similar degree of certainty in their mission and
ideology. Have we merely replaced one professional
paradigm with another that is also destined to fail,
despite our good intentions? In the face of this
conundrum, architects and planners must affirm
their principles and their commitment to action; our
cities and suburbs have a myriad of problems that
demand urgent solutions. But, being neither funda-
mentalist nor unilateral, we must simultaneously
reserve room for doubt, and be open to question. We
have to allow the possibility that we are wrong, just as
our predecessors were wrong before us! However,
unlike our modernist forebears, we embrace the
study of history and precedent in our work, and we
heed George Santayana’s words: ‘Those who cannot
remember the past are condemned to repeat it’
(Santayana, 1905: p. 284).
Accordingly, we pay particular attention to how
modernist architecture and planning operated 
on the
ground
, the place where people were affected by it
most directly. By observing the transformations of
the nineteenth-century industrial city wrought by
modernist pioneers and their disciples in Britain and
America, we gain insight into the values and ideas
that shape our post-industrial city today.