Air pollution was dramatically reduced and we were able to transform single-use roads into multi-use public space – vastly expanding the network of pedestrian-biased streets, cycle paths, market places, avenues and making possible a substantial central park. These public spaces were carefully linked to create a single interconnected web of movement. The overall aim was to locate the community’s everyday needs including public transport within comfortable walking distance and away from through traffic.Woven into the public domain and focused on the six main transport interchanges were the neighbourhoods, each with a different character and all within 10 to 15 minutes’ walk of the park and an adjoining neighbourhood. Predominantly commercial offices and retail were located closer to the busy underground stations.With less need for road space, buildings could be joined together to form streets and squares. By varying the heights of buildings we could optimise daylight into buildings and focus sunlight into the streets, squares and avenues.

The result was a city profile crowned by a series of towers.Whether Shanghai itself will pursue any of these proposals is an open question. Political and commercial pressures have already led to the sale of isolated sites. And the highest building in the East is to be erected in the very centre of our unbuilt park. This will lead to the construction of roads to service the new buildings and will generate the classic market- driven form of the modern commercial city.Yet for a huge number of the world’s new urban dwellers, the shanty town is their first and usually only experience of modern city life.Shanty settlements, which are normally illegal, in some cases house as much as 75 per cent of a city’s population and these shanty towns mostly lack even the most rudimentary services such as drainage, electricity and clean water. In Bombay 5 million people – the population of inner London – are shanty dwellers. Yet in some rare cases squatters have displayed a degree of social cohesiveness and resourcefulness and have created viable low-cost towns. It is now widely accepted that – in the absence of a fairer distribution of wealth – the best way of helping squatter settlements is to encourage self-help and to provide vision and technical support.There are success stories.

Curitiba, in south-east Brazil, once a desperate shanty town but now a vibrant city with more than 2 million residents, has made self-reliance the spirit of its daily life and environmental sustainability is its top priority. Recycling has become an integral part of the Curitiban lifestyle – the parks are lit with lamps made from Fanta soda bottles, and domestic garbage is handed in to central refuse yards in exchange for fresh vegetables The town was once covered in festering garbage It is now planned around a network of parks and squares. Twenty years ago Curitiba had half a square metre of open space per citizen, today it has 100 times more. Clearly the extraordinary problems that shanty towns face must be primarily tackled from within the community.Cities have become parasitic additions to the landscape – huge organisms drawing their sustenance from the world over, relentless consumers, relentless polluters. In the beginning we built cities to overcome our environment In the future we must build cities to nurture it..

Richard Curtis was looking deeply troubled. As the writer of an astonishing range of TV comedy from Not the Nine O’Clock News through Blackadder and Mr Bean to The Vicar of Dibley, and as someone who was nominated for an Oscar last week for Four Weddings and a Funeral, you would have thought Curtis was a relaxed pro on the mouth-and- trousers circuit. Any one of these achievements should have spawned dozens of interviews, yet, incredibly, this is Curtis’s first newspaper interview for 15 years. When I arrived, Curtis was pacing up and down at the thought of having to do an interview, and things did not get off to a good start. He refused to answer the not terribly probing question, “Are you thrilled about the Oscar nomination?” on the grounds it was too personal.

It took time for the charming, generous and good-natured man that he is to emerge.
He distrusts the press, he says, because 15 years ago the Daily Express said, wrongly, that he disliked his old school, Harrow (he quickly wrote to Harrow to put that right). In addition, a few years ago he was misquoted as saying something snide about Emma Thompson, who in fact is a good friend. These were not, on the face of it, the most blatant examples of the press drinking in the last chance saloon. But they give an insight into how protective Curtis is about his personal life.Perhaps he sees me as a soft touch. After all, I stifle the congratulations to him and his girlfriend Emma Freud on the forthcoming happy event, completely failed to understand Angus Deayton’s joke at the Comic Relief launch that Curtis’s next film will be called No Weddings and a Baby, and if there are former girlfriends of Curtis who claim to recognise chunks of the man in the Hugh Grant character in Four Weddings, I fail to mention them Not that Curtis would have consented to such an interview. We are here to discuss Comic Relief, a passion that Curtis is prepared to share, even if his uneasiness about breaking the habit of his adult lifetime means he unconsciously tears a plastic teaspoon into a dozen pieces as he does so.Curtis started Comic Relief with his friend Jane Tewson in 1985, when they both went out to Africa for Oxfam and Save the Children.