The traditional template
       

The defining structure of Task Force proposals was generally that of the traditional European city. The desire was to create new urban quarters, or to undertake new development in a way that could forge one or more urban quarters out of an incomplete existing city fabric. The “urban quarter” is used to imply an area of around fifty acres (a diameter of ten minutes’ walk), possessing a clear centre, containing a range of residential, work and other services, and organically linked to other, similar quarters. The template of the traditional city, upon which the site-specific proposals of the Task Force elected to draw, is defined by a permeable pattern of streets and squares, with the boundaries of circulation routes established by building edges rather than vice versa. 

  Caprarola: Densification of the suburb of  "Paradisa".

The buildings, constituting a continuous “fabric”, rather than isolated “signature” statements, coalesce into blocks, many of which contain a complementary range of urban functions within them. The architecture responds to a typology which, while serving the specific functions demanded of it as building, also serves a secondary set of requirements concerned with supporting the urban structure. A high degree of legibility inhabits the hierarchy - of both public and private structures - created by the main architectural statements. 

The template offered by the traditional city, therefore, is one in which global decisions inform, and are everywhere supported by, more localised decisions about the urban fabric. Were cities to be designed rationally, it would be this structure - creating the conditions for the right balance of community and privacy, sociability and contemplation, and hence for the highest degree of civilised life - which would constrain other processes, which present themselves as neutral, but which are themselves intrinsically pattern- or structure-generating, whether these be concerned with development economics, civic politics or architectural philosophy. One of the best illustrations of this traditional structure adapted to modern construction is The Prince of Wales’s own village development at Poundbury. 

In addition to reviving this physical model of city-building, therefore, it was a longer-term aim of the Task Force to suggest new types of practical decision-making process, able to realise the tightly-structured form of the new city.