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Nicholas Boys Smith is a British urbanist. He is the director of urbanist think tank Create Streets, and was the former leader of the government's Office for Place

Career

On 7 September 2023, following the closure of numerous schools due to a crisis involving RAAC concrete, Boys Smith argued in an article for UnHerd that post-war architecture was "reckless" and that its architects were "arrogant", making use of the 1968 partial collapse of Newham residential tower Ronan Point as an example. This was countered by over a dozen leading architectural figures, who argued that Ronan Point was a failure because architects were not involved in its construction, and stated that Boys Smith's claims were "party political campaigning" as the RAAC crisis was largely caused by a reduction in spending on school buildings under the Conservative government. In January 2024, he argued that not all of the green belt should be "preserved in aspic for ever".