The Daring Experiment: Social Scientists and Land-Use Planning in 1940s Britain

An important but little studied feature of the British town-planning movement in the 1940s was the active participation of social scientists. The quite radical nature of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and associated legislation owed much to the activities of this group, both in the development of specific policies at every scale from house design to regional balance, and in the successful promulgation of the idea of planning itself. In this paper the author discusses how and why social scientists became involved in the area of land-use reform, gives substantive examples of their participation, and concludes by considering why it failed to endure.