The Battle For Tolmers Square Routledge Revivals

First published in 1976, this book tells of the dramatic struggle between tenants’ groups, community associations, students, squatters, intellectuals, political parties, and property developers at Tolmers Square in north London. The author describes how property developers, interested only in maximising profits, attempted to redevelop the Tolmers area for offices, while the local authority, pressurised by local tenants and faced with a housing shortage, tried to redevelop for housing. This book is about the politics of central city redevelopment. Although this text focuses on one particular case study, the same processes operate in all cities where land is used as a commodity for financial speculation. By tracing the Tolmers case in detail, this text demonstrates the forces which operate in city redevelopment, and shows the affect which various forms of opposition can have.

This book, published in 1980, is an iconoclastic account of one of the pillars of the welfare state, British town and country planning, between 1945 and 1975. Always a fine balance between central control and market forces, it was challenged by strains within and between the environmental professions and protest by people dispossessed or alienated by re-shaped urban environments. Remaking Cities critiques the export of western-style planning to the developing world and reviews initiatives rooted in different understandings of ‘growth’ appearing in those years. Nearly forty years on, many of the same issues beset us, notably the depressingly familiar inner city problem, despite countless reports, funds and ‘programmes’. But now our infrastructure and services, once publicly owned, are privatised and fragmented, and local government progressively relegated. The very core of planning, development control, is being pared in a struggle to regain the ‘growth’ which led to our current crisis. This gives fresh importance to the need for new modes of creating liveable, sustainable environments, emphasised in this important work.

First published in 1987, this title was one of the first to explore the emerging popular movement of Community Architecture, championed by Prince Charles, which gained momentum throughout Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. The conceptual framework rests fundamentally on the principle that the built environment is most effective when those who live in a particular area are actively engaged with its creation and daily administration. A work that has influenced policy makers and planning legislation, Community Architecture remains one of the key reference works for student architects and planners.

Britain’s planning system began as ‘town and country planning’ to repair the ravages of unplanned industrialism and promote ideal environments for the future. Steering a course between left and right, public control and for-profit development, it survived successive booms and busts, broadening to include new concerns like ecology, conservation and community participation. By the 1986, when this book was first published, the system’s survival beyond the year 2000 was in doubt. It did endure, but it is now under serious threat from the right, which sees it as obstructing enterprise and the restoration of ‘growth’. It has been stripped of some of its core aims and mechanisms, while as yet there is no agenda distinguishing growth that will be sustainable from growth which self-evidently is not. The Government of Space was written as a concise guide for the non-specialist to the origins and evolution of British planning, its intellectual pedigree, achievements and cruxes. It is an invaluable background to the state of planning and the cases for and against it today.

Through seven London case studies of communities opposing social housing demolition and/or proposing community-led plans, Community-Led Regeneration offers a toolkit of planning mechanisms and other strategies that residents and planners working with communities can use to resist demolition and propose community-led schemes. The case studies are Walterton and Elgins Community Homes, West Ken and Gibbs Green Community Homes, Cressingham Gardens Community, Greater Carpenters Neighbourhood Forum, Focus E15, People’s Empowerment Alliance for Custom House (PEACH), and Alexandra and Ainsworth Estates. Together, these case studies represent a broad overview of groups that formed as a reaction to proposed demolitions of residents' housing, and groups that formed as a way to manage residents' homes and public space better. Drawing from the case studies, the toolkit includes the use of formal planning instruments, as well as other strategies such as sustained campaigning and activism, forms of citizen-led design, and alternative proposals for the management and ownership of housing by communities themselves. Community-Led Regeneration targets a diverse audience: from planning professionals and scholars working with communities, to housing activists and residents resisting the demolition of their neighbourhoods and proposing their own plans.

An insight into the changing nature of the industrial and business space property market and how business space development schemes can be initiated and implemented to revitalise urban areas.