At the beginning of this book we indicated we were not sure if we were writing a manifesto or an elegy. We are still not sure. Perhaps it’s best described as a message in a bottle. The message is in two parts. The first is a warning to the international community not to repeat the obvious mistakes of planning deregulation in England. The second is an invitation to all of us to start building the utopia that all of our children and our grandchildren deserve and for which we already have the technical know-how.

Thomas More's Utopia was the catalyst for one of most extraordinary journeys in human history, a journey in search of the ideal community which became one of the great inspirations for the practical action delivered by the town planning and Garden Cities movements. This book has recorded the end of that journey by cataloguing a period of intense reform leading to the decline of the town planning legacy. Of course we should all have stood up for planning and place-making and the values of social justice and sustainable development, but we didn’t. This was partly because of a simple lack of courage, but it was also because the planning system was, by 2010, only a shadow of the ambitious creative force it was intended to be. So, what now?

We have in our hands the means of creating a sustainable future. This book and the countless other solutions that have been implemented across the world show the potential for change and how that change can make a real practical difference, not just to basic planetary survival but to the way we live our lives.

In 1962 Rachel Carson set out two possible future pathways: ‘we stand now where two roads diverge … the road we have long been travelling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road – the one “less travelled by” – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth. The choice, after all, is ours to make.