The codemaker

But Paul Murrain, the foundation's senior design director, doesn't see any contradiction between his love of Hoxton and his job convincing the world of the joy of developments like Poundbury. "In lots of ways the two environments are very similar in the way they work," he says. "You wouldn't expect them to be the same and they're certainly not going to house the same type of people and have the same function, but in terms of what makes places work for people they're out of the same mould."

His words may seem innocuous, but to many designers they are anathema. They encapsulate the theory of "coding" – the idea that one set of rules on layout, building height, materials and design can be applied to entire developments (see "DNA for development", page 28).

Architects are spluttering into their skinny lattes at the idea and social housing providers cannot ignore it either. The deputy prime minister has declared that urban codes will be used to ensure the success of the Communities Plan's growth areas; government design champion the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment is backing them and regeneration quango English Partnerships has just started work on a 43 ha project in Upton, Northamptonshire, based on the principle of urban coding.

The ODPM sees this as a chance not just to ensure sustainable communities, but also to speed up the planning process by making developers aware of exactly what is expected of them from the start. For many other people, however, it is a one-way ticket to conservative architecture – a stereotype not helped by the fact that the foundation's president is Prince Charles, a chap never shy to express his hatred of cutting-edge, modern design. Lord Rogers, chair of the urban taskforce, called Poundbury a "questionable exercise in Hardy-esque nostalgia" and said he knew of no codes that had worked in the last 50-100 years. Others label the schemes paternalistic and socially constraining.

Who's right?

"You have to get over the stylistic issue and examine how successful communities have been created," says Murrain in his soft Sheffield burr. "Why were the Georgians able to do it nearly 200 years ago – why aren't we doing it now?"

He believes the debate has been sidetracked by antipathy towards the style of Poundbury. The buildings, he maintains, are genuinely modern, in terms of their energy efficiency, their layout and their ability to cope with cars. "It's amazing how many experts there are about Poundbury who've never even been to Dorset."

A committed urbanist who has spent 25 years working on city design – including such complex urban environments as Sydney, Melbourne and Johannesburg – he is "passionately in love" with dense conurbations such as Rome, Paris, London and Manhattan that have stood the test of time. "People have extraordinary views. Perhaps they think people living in Greenwich Village in New York, which is just row houses from the 19th century, are therefore conservative people. They should spend a weekend in Greenwich Village and they'll get the shock of their lives. It's ridiculous to say a particular architectural style is somehow a conservative thing."

Murrain believes architects would, paradoxically, be forced to be more imaginative if working under the constraints of town codes. Codes are principles that define development, says Murrain, but it is up to the writer of the code to determine what those principles are (see "How to …", page 28). They may be badly used, says Murrain, but that should not be used to damn the system.

Desperate times
His views on the social housing built in the past 50 years, although delivered with characteristic amiability, are no less than vitriolic. "Those people who have suffered most of all are those desperate for some form of dwelling, some kind of roof over their head. All manner of people have experimented with their lives – and my God, have they suffered. A laboratory of millions of human rats with which to fiddle about.

"This contemporary version of modernity was the first period of modernity that utterly rejected the past. It's incredibly important for people to handle the unknown future in their personal lives by having something familiar.

"Don't you think the stuff we've been building for the past 50 years is desperate? I do. The stuff that we've been building, a lot of the stuff for the last 60 years, I think desperate is a modest description."

He believes the biggest obstacle to the uptake of coding – to building whole communities rather than just collections of houses – is the lack of planning skills.

He is scathing about a planning system he feels "sure as night follows day, hasn't been producing skills to build towns, just to produce statistics, numbers".

Murrain does not enjoy having his photo taken and, though he says he is suspicious of journalists' motives, his passion for the subject makes him very communicative. As the public face of Poundbury, he is certainly no stranger to critical coverage. The brickbat that upsets him the most, however, is the suggestion that he is trying to create ghettos for rich people.

Much of the controversy over the proposal to build a new model village, Surfbury, on Prince Charles' land near Newquay, has been focused around this. Paul Tyler, the local Liberal Democrat MP, says: "We have the worst affordability gap in the whole of the country and it would be outrageous if we were just left with a Kensington-on-Sea."

The price of success
Murrain's response is forthright: "I don't really have much time or patience with people who say Surfbury's going to be housing for the rich, and all that bullshit – they've no bloody idea, they haven't a clue. Actually the Prince is deeply concerned with these issues, as he has shown at Poundbury, so why make such a ridiculously unfounded statement?"

Poundbury has 20% affordable homes – meeting the West Dorset council guideline in force when the village was conceived in the 1980s. The council has now upped the rate to 35% and Poundbury's developer is the first to agree to meet it.

For Murrain, the recent hike in house prices in Poundbury show that it is emulating the success of similarly coded US towns, such as Seaside in Florida. "This unfair criticism of being places for the rich, well, you've got to ask yourself, why? People voting with their wallet – in the USA where the choice is considerable – where there are these towns based on how towns traditionally worked, the houses per se are no better. It's often more expensive, it's often small, certainly doesn't have much land – so how come it's fetching a small fortune?"

Murrain himself lives in Southwark, south-east London, "with a seven-storey social housing block on one side and a busy railway viaduct the other."

So, would he swap the grubby splendour of his beloved urban lifestyle for the quiet life in Dorset? "If I had the choice I wouldn't live in Poundbury, because it doesn't fit my personal circumstances," he admits. "But given the choice between Poundbury and standard suburban houses – I'd be there in a shot. Poundbury's no more wrong than any other place, and it's a damn site more right than a lot of them."