Many lessons can be learned from Copenhagen, which has taken 40 years to become a truly liveable city, he says. ‘Years ago, when Jan Gehl and others said that they wanted chairs and tables in the streets, they were told that such ideas were nonsense. But visit Copenhagen now, even in the winter, and people are sitting out having coffee, frequently with a blanket around them.'

More than 36 per cent of people in Copenhagen cycle to work. There is always a good mix of people, bikes and cars on the streets. The streets are not pedestrianised, but are they are safe. People look out of their windows during the day because they're working, and look out of their windows in the evening because they're at home.

Some city regeneration projects, in central Manchester for example, raise people's belief in the city, says Ferguson. We need to learn from our successes. There are simple rules that we can follow: putting doors onto the street, putting in a mix of uses. In Malmo, Sweden, really good new places have been created using the old science of how people actually act. ‘One of the key issues of sustainability is enjoyability. If we enjoy a place, we travel less to go elsewhere.'

The great London Estates of Mayfair and Belgravia were created by developers who had vision as well as the power of land ownership. They knew that a quality place would raise values as well as pleasing people. This wisdom has been lost. Today, says Ferguson, we need to make a change by aspiration and inspiration - and that means people, local authorities and the developers alike. ‘We need to understand that if we can produce beautiful, amenable, walkable and friendly places that we raise not just property prices, but also the value of our towns and cities. The challenge is to create effective partnerships between the developer, the planner and public land-owning bodies.

Academy director Tony Reddy agrees. ‘Some of the essential ingredients of place have gone missing from our towns and cities,' he says. In the early 20th century, modernist planning principles were adopted, leading to the creation of separate zones instead of traditional mixed use areas, he adds. At the time, many agreed with the idea of moving industry out of towns and cities and crating residential zones. Yet these moves led to increasing car dependence. ‘In most towns and cities now, there are suburban zones round the fringes that don't have good attributes of place.

This is one of the things that built environment professionals and our academicians are trying to tackle. We want to see more complex cities and towns, with more choice of movement, be that by public transport, foot, cycle or car.'

This separation of uses has been mirrored by the professions, which split into inward-focused ‘silos'. Both the design and delivery of good places suffered, says Reddy, as we worked against a system that had frequently already fixed, at a macro planning or highways level, many of the characteristics that define and characterise place.

We need to get back to bringing the professions together, and to reach out to a much wider range of place stakeholders: politicians, local interest groups, economists, geographers. There is a growing consensus to this effect, but we are still in the minority, adds Reddy. ‘If we don't get this right soon, the knowledge workers of the future - on whom the world will depend - will begin to head for the places that do get it right.'

X-raying our cities

There is so much valuable information locked up in practices, campaign groups, professional bodies, universities and local council departments. At the Academy of Urbanism, we want to move towards creating a cumulative knowledge bank, says John Thompson. Our academicians are involved in initiatives that are attempting to define methodologies about describing place and character. We want to see academia, civil society, local policy makers and professionals getting involved in ‘place', so that we can stimulate collective learning. Our events during 2008 will test drive this approach.

Just as the x-ray reveals the structure operating beneath a complex organism, the Academy of Urbanism plans to bring teams of people together to conduct a mass process of x-raying our towns and cities, in order to reveal something of their underlying social, cultural and environmental order that is somehow hidden from view, even given the kinds of metrics and indicators that are currently being complied.

In order for the Academy of Urbanism to engage interested parties in this kind of multi-disciplinary study of any given town or city in the UK, a clear methodology needs to be developed. Discrete parameters can then be brought into play as part of a more complex array of experimental determinates. In this way, the results of any study will be properly comparable, and lessons can be learned about urban living in today's society.

‘We need to understand that if we can produce beautiful, amenable, walkable and friendly places, that we raise not just property prices, but also the value of our towns and cities'