Search

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 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Modern conventional farming provides Western Europe and North America with reliable, high quality, and relatively cheap supplies of food and fiber, increasingly viewed as a potential source of fuel. One of the costs is continued widespread pollution of rivers and groundwater—predominantly by nutrients. In 1970, in both the United States and UK, farming was focused on maximizing yield and management practices were rapidly modernizing. Little attention was paid to the external impacts of farming. In 2010, diffuse pollution from agriculture is being seriously addressed by both voluntary and statutory means in an attempt to balance environmental costs with the continued benefits of agricultural production. In this paper we consider long-term changes in the concentration and flux of nitrate in five rural UK rivers to demonstrate the impact of agricultural intensification and subsequent policies to reduce diffuse pollution on river water quality between 1970 and 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]