The Buchanan Report, Environment and the Problem of Traffic in 1960s Britain

Abstract

Traffic congestion in Britain's towns and cities grew with the exponential rise of car ownership in the 1950s and 1960s. The Buchanan Report, Traffic in Towns (1963), was a pioneering response to this problem, advancing a series of radical solutions for how cities could be adapted to mass car ownership. This article examines the contemporary debate about traffic among planners and politicians in the 1960s and considers both short-term responses to the Buchanan Report and its longer term effects in cities such as Leeds and Leicester. The legacy of Buchanan was ambivalent: while many of its prescriptions favoured a new, environmentally sensitive approach to the historic fabric and urban living, the report's arguments for radical reconstruction pointed to the building of urban motorways. Paradoxically, the growth of environmental awareness in 1960s Britain was linked to the endeavour to modernize the nation's towns and cities and to create the conditions for a car-owning society.

Urban History

“…Histories of the automobile and of roads, for example, demonstrate how these inanimate objects and structures have a powerful determinative impact on human agency in the urban context, while historians of the nineteenth-century city have analyzed how the modern liberal society was brought into being through techniques of governance that depended on an infrastructure of water, sewerage, gas, and electricity (Gunn, 2011;Joyce, 2003;Otter, 2008). This greater openness to using material culture has also influenced urban history on a conceptual level by decentering the importance of human agency (drawing also on Actor Network Theory) and focusing attention on the agency of inanimate objects, buildings, spaces in shaping the behavior of individuals and society at large.…”

Review of periodical literature published in 2011

“…Other rewarding pieces focused on social, cultural, and political issues have included work by Lee detailing issues of family and nation connected with the 22,000 British children fathered by US soldiers during the Second World War; an article by Gunn on the issues of mass car ownership and growing environmental awareness in the early 1960s; and Bunce on the political and ideological emergence of black radicalism in Britain in the late 1960s. A piece by Smith and Marmo, drawing upon recently released Home Office files, details the institutional structures that legitimized the extensive use of degrading medical examinations (‘virginity tests’) conducted by immigration officers on migrant women from the Indian subcontinent during the 1970s.…”

Dreading the Future: Ambivalence and Doubt in the Dutch Urban Renewal Order

“…As Simon Gunn has observed for Britain, policy makers and advisers saw the car as a threat rather than an opportunity. 31 This was no different in the Netherlands, where the number of cars and commutes by car increased fivefold between 1960 and 1970. 32 As early as 1963 future Labour prime minister Joop den Uyl argued that it was a democratic right for every worker to have his/her own car, 33 a statement that signifies how mass motorisation was set to affect lifestyles profoundly.…”