A Conservative View

Abstract

The city is the most important of our products. It was Winston Churchill who once said, ‘We shape our cities and then they shape our way of life’. Britain’s urban problems are aggravated because of the way the majority of our cities developed in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. These cities contain old housing, old factories and old civic buildings. Their rivers have been allowed to become polluted and they suffer from a lack of any total concept or vision. The western world faces problems that arise because a society with a disorganised mixture of competing objectives is unable to provide a high quality of life. The several self-interests do not add up to common benefit. It is the way we tackle the problem of improving the quality of city life that will determine whether our cities will prove to be the death or the revival of our civilisation.