Editorial

The relevance of the 'historic city' to the future of urban living is one of the recurrent fault lines in debates between urban designers, planners, developers and other built-environment specialists. For its advocates the historic city is a source of inspiration: a high-density model that sustains a walkable, energy efficient environment and resilient, mixed-use economy. For the sceptics, such an image offers no vision of the future because it stands contrary to the actual history of many contemporary cities where old centres have been affected by social and economic blight usually accompanied by acute physical deterioration. They claim that this indicates an irreversible process of decline that cannot be satisfactorily disguised by 'rebranding' historic centres as tourist destinations or celebrating the selective gentrification of prime urban locations. Instead, they propose, a radical thinking of conventional urban models is required to understand what will be needed in the twenty-first century.

This debate also distinguishes different traditions in urbanism. For example, Edward Glaeser's argument that - all things being equal - humans would opt to live in dense, information-rich settlements, belongs (broadly speaking) in the Jane Jacobs tradition (Glaeser, 2001). However, other voices such as Thomas Sieverts assert that new ways of conceiving of 'the urban' are necessary in order to fully understand and better design for the dispersed agglomerations of built form that are the characteristic milieu of highly mobile populations living in contemporary urban regions in the developed world (Sieverts, 2003). With some license, we might put Sieverts in the tradition of Ebenezer Howard or Lewis Mumford for whom the dense industrial city was a 'problem' requiring a 'solution' in which the accommodation of large open spaces within an extended urban fabric would play an important part.

The revolution in social and working practices associated with the internet and the widespread availability of portable telecommunication devices has created a new 'digital layer'. The relationship of this aspatial (or 'transpatial') network with the corporeal rhythms of urban space is as yet far from clear. Yet, the ever-imminent irrelevance of the 'urban variable' in the face of global economic transformation has been announced before and it would be prudent not to rush to this conclusion once again. The traditional urbanists undoubtedly have a point in claiming that...