3. Townscape and Urban Design

The literature on crime and housing as elements in quality of life includes many references to urban design, and this factor clearly has an important role to play in perceptions of the city as a civilised place in which to live and work. Despite the fact that Britain is, and has long been, a highly urbanised country, it has failed to develop a coherent sense of big city life, and rural (or country town) nostalgia remains endemic. The Regional lifestyles 1992 report from the consultancy Mintel found, for example, that two-thirds of its 1,000 sample would prefer to live in the country rather than the city because of its open space, cleanliness, quietness and lack of stress. Nor is this level of rural preference simply a result of recent urban problems; a study in the early 1960s by the geographer Peter Hall showed that the "desired future place" of residence of 59% of people lay in the countryside. Nearly 30% favoured the suburbs, and only 8% the town.

Despite evidence of a trend towards re-urbanisation in western Europe by the late 1980s, largely for economic reasons, British people still yearn for the quieter pleasures of the village and small town even though, in many cases, these pleasures are illusory. The same problems of unemployment, crime, congestion and environmental degradation which disfigure so many cities are becoming apparent in the countryside and market towns, and rural life has never been the idyll many believe it to be. Nonetheless, the image of rural tranquillity remains strong in the face of counter assertions that "cities are good for us" and that "it's suburbs, not cities, that stink".

The persistence of this image suggests that anti-urban feelings are very deeply rooted in the psyche, despite the fact that cities might be described as one of the most distinctive achievements of human evolution. Evidence from surveys by environmental psychologists shows, paradoxically, that a major reason for dislike of cities is the fact that they are man-made rather than natural. Many people put a far greater value on natural than constructed environments, and associate cities with a form of enforced sensory deprivation in which experience of the "real" world is denied them. They cannot see the horizon, smell fresh air, or mark the change of the seasons; their daily lives are spent in artificially lit and artificially ventilated buildings; and they cannot stand back from the cluttered urban world and see it in context. Smaller towns (particularly country towns) can satisfy the human need for control and identity - they allow us to see the wood for the trees - but big cities often serve only to diminish and disempower the individual.