Melvin M Webber
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Melvin M Webber (1921-2006) was an urban designer and theorist associated for most of his career with the University of California at Berkeley but whose work was internationally important.
His most important work was in the 1960s & 1970s when he pioneered thinking about cities of the future, adapted for the age of telecommunications and mass automotive mobility. These would not be concentric clusters as in the past but urban-associational areas. Webber's 1964 paper Urban Place and the Non-Place Urban Realm[1] set the terms for much of his later work and introduced the idea of 'community without propinquity': cities that were clusters of settlements with the urban realm of its occupants being determined by social links and economic networks in a 'Non-Place Urban Realm'. His 1974 article Permissive Planning[2] developed the idea that urbanists should be enablers not designers or controllers, using an engineeering approach to solving urban planning issues. In that paper he criticised urban designers for internalising 'the concepts and methods of design from civil engineering and architecture'.
He was later invovled in the development of public transport, apparently regretting the car-focussed implications of his early work, though his theories are as applicable to transport planning as a laisez-faire car based approach to urbanism. One of the most developed examples of his ideas is the design for Milton Keynes, a new city in the United Kingdom, built on a devolved and radical grid plan from 1967, where the Chief Architect described[citation needed] Webber as the 'father of the city'.
