Planning Responses to Major Structural Change: Some Experiences from British Cities

摘要

This paper arose as a result of an invitation to its author to attend a workshop in Leipzig, in the former East Germany, in April 2002. I was asked to reflect on my experiences of trying to tackle problems with some similarities to those being faced in Leipzig. The focus of the workshops was a large area of Western Leipzig which had mainly been built-up around 1900, predominantly by four or five-storey apartment blocks interspersed with industrial premises, but which now faced major difficulties caused by the mutually-reinforcing problems of population loss, declining levels of economic activity, widespread dereliction and disrepair, and an inability to support public and private services on an appropriate scale. The photographs, which are described briefly in the following paragraphs, show something both of the problems the area faces and of its very real potential.