Politics, patronage and parallels.

Architecture is both a response to, and consequence of, context. Not merely in respect of site, but the multiple contexts from which the built environment springs: economic, political, social, cultural and historical. However committed a government may be (or claim to be) in respect of architectural achievement, the true measure of its commitment will be apparent in the totality of what is built, not what it may commission as an act of patronage. 'By their buildings shall ye know them' suggests that it is the big landmarks which mark a government, a city or a civilisation; archaeology reveals a greater truth, by identifying the nature of everyday buildings and their utility for ordinary people. That is why Classical cities continue to impress so much: it was not just the major projects which were remarkable, but the infrastructure, the city planning and the combination of art, architecture and engineering in everyday life.

This issue of The Architectural Review focuses on what has happened in South Africa over the past decade, in a society still coming to terms with its fraught political past, with ways of expressing racial and cultural identity and diversity, and with the tension between the relatively rich and the relatively poor, accentuated by racial difference. To some (although lesser) extent this has been true of other democracies undergoing significant political change. In France, suburban unrest has accompanied the election of a new president whose attitude to ethnic minorities has been unnecessarily combative; one question the new president might ask is how built environment policies have produced what look in some areas like apartheid conditions. It all seems a long way from the glory years of the Grands Projets.

Meanwhile in Britain, the prime ministerial heir apparent declares that new towns are the answer to urban housing problems. The new towns will be ecologically correct, raising the old spectre of the traditional town as unhealthy if not diseased, as something to be feared, and something from which the young and dynamic should flee. Gordon Brown's more positive architectural inheritance from the Blair years is partly of his own making, involving as it has the massive funding of health and education programmes. These will continue for some time; the question is how one balances quality against quantum, a question that is universal whatever the political or economic condition of the country in question. Being housed, educated and treated in decent buildings is a mark of the underlying efficiency and integrity of any country, impossible to achieve without peace, justice and good government--and an attitude to building culture. An icon in the desert, whatever its architectural merit, is a symbol only of itself.