This book has two simple messages. Firstly, the rich utopian tradition that underpinned the town planning movement in England is dead. It now needs wholesale recreation. Secondly, if we are to achieve this renaissance we need positive and creative ideas that make a real difference to people's lives.

This book is part manifesto for the future of England and part elegy for the wider western utopian tradition, a tradition we celebrate in 2016 with the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia. With a kind of ironic symmetry we will mark this date in England with the abandonment of any commitment to the high ideals that drove so much progressive change over the last 150 years. In a debate marked by a rich mix of apathy and political hypocrisy, England will bury these utopian ideals just at the moment when we, and wider world, need them most. The external challenges intensify as fast as we destroy the tools we need to deal with them. From the historic agreement at the United Nations Paris Climate Conference in November 2015 to the severe flooding in Cumbria in December 2015, from the growing levels of homelessness in England to the greatest mass migration in Europe since 1945, we are unprepared and ill equipped.

The notion of sustainable development in town planning, the supposed foundation of the system, is now completely devalued, appearing at the table occasionally like Banquo's ghost to remind planners of what they used to believe in. Planning has been subject to regulatory capture, with those whom it was meant to regulate now dictating its form, policy and implementation. It has become fashionable to blame those parts of the private sector development community who have done well out of these changes. That is an easy analysis, but it is both wrong and not the purpose of this book. In fact some parts of the private sector have done very badly out the government's reforms on a range of policies, most notably those working with innovative place-making technologies in energy efficiency, renewable energy and flood resilience. The responsibility for the purpose and implementation of planning policy lies with government; and with those who elected them.