Urban contrast and neo-Toryism: on the social and political symbolism of The Architectural Review 's Townscape campaign

Anthony Raynsford

Planning Perspectives, 2015, vol. 30, issue 1, 95-128

Abstract: Using archival evidence from Hastings' unpublished writings, as well as from representative Townscape publications, this essay chronologically traces the genesis and development of Townscape as social and political project within the history of British planning theory. Revising recent scholarship on Townscape, the article posits that Townscape embraced a conservative project, in many ways resistant to the emerging welfare state and to the dominant government consensus for regionalist principles of post-war reconstruction. It argues that Townscape posited an anti-collectivist model of society, bound together, not through a consensus of aims or viewpoints, but through a composite ecology of individualizing difference, developed according to one's unique cultural role or 'bias'. Paralleling conservative British political discourses of the period, Townscape aestheticized and naturalized such differences through a tri-partite model of social types and a metaphorical construction of society as nature. Understanding the central significance of this social and political symbolism allows for new understanding of Townscape's construction of social complexity, as well as its use of organic analogies to describe social difference.

Date: 2015
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DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2014.918861

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