Prescott's housing plans repeat failures of the past, says royal guru

[tjwmason]

A design guru hired by the Prince of Wales has criticised British housing developments for being soulless suburbs that depend on the car and repeat the mistakes of the new towns of the 1940s and 1950s.

Hank Dittmar, 49, an American who was appointed last month as the chief executive of the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, said that John Prescott's plans for huge new housing schemes in the South were "a moment of great danger as well as great opportunity".


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/01/15/nditt15.xml

Do any American DUers know anything about Mr. Dittmar. It seems to me like he is making sense, rejecting car-based new-towns in favour of pedestrian-based and public-transport ones which foster genuine community. Milton Keynes is on of the few car-based towns in Britain; it is absolutely ghastly and most of us in the rest of Buckinghamshire were delighted when it was chopped off a few years ago.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. No, but I know that the car-based burb wastes land like nothing else,

and makes no sense in a small, densely populated country.