Place in our hearts: Mary Parsons, Chair of the Town & Country Planning Association

We still struggle to get the basics right when we build homes and places, thinks Mary Parsons. Yet Garden City principles still hold good, especially after Covid has forced us all to think harder about where we live, where we work, and how we use towns and cities. Planners, designers, builders and developers need to think even harder about quality and less about quantity, she argues. Which means understanding what people really need and avoiding our recent tendency to build-in obsolescence.