Making better places : urban design now

This book celebrates the twenty-first birthday of the Joint Centre for Urban Design, a joint venture of the Schools of Planning and Architecture at Oxford Brookes University.
During this period the JCUD has pioneered an approach to urban design which has challenged the orthodoxies of design education and committed itself to making better places for everybody.
This approach has been most clearly articulated in Responsive Environments - published by Butterworth Architecture in 1985 - a book which stimulated much discussion and debate within and beyond the JCUD. Making Better Places: Urban Design Now represents the current concerns of staff and associates of the JCUD and provides an opportunity for its approach to be reviewed, reassembled and re-energized. It sets out an argument about urban design that is literate and robust, but continually being refined.
Above all, it is an approach to urban design which is both practicable - with commonsense rules and explicit value systems - yet radical in its exposure of who holds power over whom in the city.´
It is appropriate that this anniversary publication raises as many questions as it answers - it provokes the reader and it informs and illuminates. This book explains where this generation of urban designers has come from, gives tantalizing glimpses of where they might be going, and is a major landmark in the literature of making places.