The form and organisation of urban areas: Colin Buchanan and Traffic in Towns 50 years on

In the early 1990s, Professor Sir Colin Buchanan embarked on the process of reordering his personal files relating to town planning and transportation extending back over 60 years. The material was then boxed and put aside, but in 2010 Sir Colin's son, Malcolm Buchanan, unearthed the files and passed on the archive to Imperial College London. This article provides an initial description of the content of the archive. A number of key concepts are first identified and then used to guide the analysis. In this paper it is argued that the common sense approach to planning advocated by Buchanan not only had a deep effect on the development of planning as a discipline, but also poses important questions related to the role and purpose of the planning system that are still relevant to these days.