The idea of this book first arose during 2002 while I was working intensively in Birmingham. Tenants in the city had jettisoned a grand plan for the future of council housing. An alternative agenda based on ‘flourishing neighbourhoods’ and communities had gained ground and the city council decided to devolve local services to local areas. This more broken-up community-based plan seemed long overdue. But what lay behind this yo-yo decision making? Why had tenants rejected the promise of millions of extra pounds of investment in their decaying homes? What were the links between the grandest of Victorian town halls and the decayed, dirty, inner neighbourhoods of the city where tenants had voted ‘No’? Why was the city so divided along ethnic and wealth lines? Where did power really lie and how did the city hold together?

I was privileged to chair an independent commission, set up by the city council, into the future of council housing, and was given access to people, documents and organisations throughout the city that allowed me to understand better the complexities of Britain's second largest city. The idea of cities as jigsaws arose from this work.

The book, woven around Birmingham's story, evolved into a study of British cities, with housing as a major focus, because my previous experience and research suggested that Birmingham's visible problems fitted the broader pattern of British cities and the housing-driven focus of urban policy. Wherever possible we use ground-level evidence from all parts of Britain. Scotland, although separate and different in many ways, particularly since devolution in 2000, has been remarkably influential in British and English urban and housing policy, so we use distinctive Scottish experience when possible.

Jigsaw cities draws directly on my own work for its original examples and for the main arguments: Islington and other London boroughs in the 1970s; local authorities and local communities in every major city in England, Wales and Scotland in the 1980s for the government-sponsored Priority Estates Project; my research into European housing and urban problems in the early 1990s; the Urban Task Force in the late 1990s (of which I was a member); community consultation on ethnic inequalities in Tower Hamlets, Birmingham, Bradford and Brixton in the 1980s and 1990s; the London Thames Gateway since 2001; low demand areas between 1996 and 2005;