Land Use in Leeds 1957–1976: Two Decades of Change in a British City

How do development and change occur in British cities, which have been subjected for over thirty years to a planning system which has generally adopted a restraining attitude to urban growth? A point-sampling technique is used to provide answers to this question for one city, Leeds, during the period 1957–1976. The approach is through the basic questions “how much change was there?”, “where did the land for change come from?”, “who caused the change?”, and “how was it effected?”. Reuse of land already in urban use, or lying unused, is seen to be a far more important contributor to change than is extension by development on agricultural land, and the contribution of unused land in particular to the dynamic aspects of urban change is found to be both complex and important.