Throughout the last few decades, the village concept has grown increasingly popular
as a model of development. The Urban Villages Forum (UVF), established in the
1990s, made the case for urban villages largely by contrasting the quality of life on
standard housing estates with that offered in characterful mixed-use, mixed-tenure
villages (Aldous, 1992). Like the New Urbanism movement in the United States, the
UVF identified increased car dependence, the contraction of heavy industry and
manufacturing in cities, and the sprawl of commercial and residential development
as ‘an intense and painful process of social, economic and physical disintegration’
(Neal, 2003). They argued that concentrating residential development in new urban
villages would offer not only good financial value but good social value as well.