Urbanism
Environment
Design

info@urbed.coop

At an Urban Villages conference in 1998, Richard Rogers in giving the keynote address, held up this report and told the audience that they must all read it. The initial print run sold out within a few weeks and we had to hurriedly reprint. Despite being done on a very small budget in just a couple of months, it turned out to be one of our most important reports both in terms of its influence and our reputation. It started with a call from a research officer at Friends of the Earth worried about the pressures building up to relax constraints on Greenfield housing. They asked whether we could disprove the arguments that said that urban areas were full and couldn't take any more housing without risking town cramming. The report marshals all of the information that we could find and undertakes a step by step demolition of the arguments against urban housing. We were subsequently asked to present the findings to the Urban Task Force who were set up a few months later.