Town planning

Can architecture solve urban crises? Or should architects and planners concentrate on mitigating the consequences of wider events (climate change, war, demographic and economic shifts), then hope for the best? What happens when we have no choice but to build or rebuild cities? In her new book, Gabriella Bennett, a journalist interested in architecture and urban landscapes, spends two years flying around the world looking for answers to these and other questions. Woven through her adventures are two personal quests: to reckon with her unhappy adolescence in the Scottish postwar new town of Glenrothes; and to reset her life after a pandemic-era health crisis that led her to quit her job.

How can Britain cut its spiralling benefits budget and the number of alienated youths spending taxpayer-generated monies on frivolous consumer goods, facing off against the police and making life unpleasant for those of us not involved in creating poverty porn documentaries? Traditional answers – such as colonising Africa or declaring war on, let’s say, Russia – are off the table. Drones, AI and our defence budget mean that there is no prospect of a Crimean War II, led by the kind of martial Britons who so frightened the Duke of Wellington on the Peninsular campaign. What then? Britain’s current problem is one that the heroes of Joad Raymond Wren’s scintillating book never had: a complete want of thinking outside the box.