The Doughnut Effect On British Cities

"Britain's second city [Birmingham] used to be a byword for urban blight. After the planners got to work on Birmingham in the 1960s, its centre was a grim confusion of concrete and flyovers. But in the late 1980s, an enterprising council started to reverse the trend with a mixture of public and private money. Since then, the citycentre has been transformed... Whilst the centre has prospered, those parts of the city that planners call the "inner suburbs" have crumbled, leaving many stranded in the no-man's land between the booming centre and the plush outer suburbs. Planners call the Urban Village movement that emerged from America in the early 1990s, whereby the segregation of urban areas into retail, industrial and living areas was abandoned, and cities reverted to mixed-use development. Editor's note: The full text of this article is available to subscribers only.