The Prince of Wales's 
Urban Design Task Force 1994-1998

The traditional Template

Towns and Cities 

Results

A "Third Way"

Photo-tour

Acknowledgements

The Prince of Wales’s Urban Design Task Force was given its name in 1994, long before Task Forces became a fashionable instrument of UK government policy*. The term was chosen as a way of making clear to those wishing to take part that the emphasis would be upon negotiation within the real world, with a concrete result, rather than the relatively abstract speculation often associated with the studio setting. 
  
* For example, the “Urban Task Force” chaired by Lord Rogers of Riverside, which delivered its  “Urban Renaissance” Report in 1999.

Director: Dr. Brian Hanson   E-mail

  Biarritz participants discuss their scheme with Maurice Culot and Leon Krier, 

Participants were offered unique exposure to those making decisions about civic design at the highest level. The Task Force therefore brought an unusually practical dimension into urban design education and practice. Unusually, too, it favoured interventions led by form rather than process, which is to say by formal hypotheses intended to shape those processes which constitute the “hidden hand” behind much urban design and architecture. This intention ran counter to almost all other comparable urban design programmes. It was intended that these hidden forces be brought out into the open, making them visible in particular to those unacquainted with, and possibly uninterested in, the politics of urban design.