In thinking about urban design it's useful to go back to the 1960s, to that period of modern architecture so unpopular today when the office block itself was the symbol of a failure, failure both of architecture and of urbanism.

This was a failure of building scale and it was a failure in a more fundamental sense I think to create buildings that made any contribution to the city and its possibilities of civilised life. Cities are mechanisms which reconcile private and public interests and in the 1960s we lost that reconciliation, and it's that idea, that ideal that we have to retrieve.