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Poor Cabe is damned if it does, damned if it doesn't. Take this sideswipe at its 'bland modernist graphic design'? Cabe had a hands-off approach to the document's which was produced by HBF. It's also absurd to suggest Building for Life is losing its ambition when the original had 258 words and the new one has 5000 (thanks to Cabe's input). It makes it so more precise in its demands. But the demands reflect what people want and need from new development, rather than what one school of design might think would improve them. Building for Life 12, as the strap line suggests, is intended to be 'The Sign of a Good Place to Live" by tackling the things that go wrong, like crude car parking, mean landscaping and a failure to link new roads and paths to existing networks and local amenity. We really don't believe a planning tool should do more than demand a distinct identity and leave that to context and market to define. The Prince's Foundation has done us all a great service in using royal patronage to relaxing highways engineers' deathly grip on layout. But its dogmatic, quasi-theological take on replicating centuries-old vernacular was part of what the original Building for Life was written to protect against.