NEW TOWN

Plan 2: Fundamentals of Urban Design and Community

Architecture
New town, a form of urban planning designed to

relocate populations away from large cities by

grouping homes, hospitals, industry and cultural,

recreational, and shopping centers to form entirely

new, relatively autonomous communities.
The first new towns were proposed in Great Britain in the New Towns

Act of 1946; between 1947 and 1950, 12 were designated in England

and Wales and 2 in Scotland, each with its own development

corporation financed by the government. The new towns were

located in relatively undeveloped sites. Each was to have an

admixture of population so as to give it a balanced social life.

Proposed ultimate population figures of this first group of new

towns ranged from 29,000 to 140,000. After 1961, target

population figures for proposed new towns rose to 70,000 to

250,000.

The idea of new towns found favour in many other countries,

notably in the United States, various countries of western 

Europe, and Soviet Siberia.

The chief criticism of new towns has been that they may

be too static in conception. In Sweden, for example, a

master plan prepared in 1952 envisaged establishing

around the periphery of Stockholm some 18

communities, each with its own residences, places of

employment, and shopping and cultural facilities.

What was not satisfactorily anticipated in the plans, however,

was the dramatic increase in commuting and other forms of

personal mobility that obviated the need for the new towns to be

so self-contained. Of the 27,000 wage earners in the suburb of

Vallingby, for instance, 25,000 were found to be commuting out,

half of them to the centre of Stockholm; in fact, Vallingby’s own

industries were drawing in commuters from outside.

EDINBURGH NEW TOWN: LANDSCAPE
ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN DESIGN
Edinburgh New Town: landscape architecture and urban design
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-JJJ_2Z22M

Understanding African New Towns: An Urban Planning Perspective

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVRykTd1JOE
NEW TOWN
After World War II a number of European countries, especially France, the Netherlands, 

Germany, and the Soviet Union, undertook the building of new towns (comprehensive

new developments outside city centers) as governmental enterprises. Concerned with

what they regarded as too much density within urban areas, governments constructed

these new towns as a means of capturing the overspill from cities within planned

developments rather than allowing haphazard exurban growth. 

Most of them, except in the Soviet Union, were primarily

residential suburbs, although some British towns such as 

Milton Keynes did succeed in attracting both industry and

population within low-rise conurbations. In Sweden the

government successfully constructed accessible high-rise

residential suburbs with mixed-income occupancy.

Tapiola, in metropolitan Helsinki, Finland, was a low-rise

ensemble embodying many of Howard’s original ideas and

incorporating architecture of the highest order. New town

development in France, Italy, Spain, and Belgium, however,

mostly resulted in large, uninviting high-rise residential

projects for the working class on the urban periphery.

American postwar new town development depended largely on private initiative, with 

Reston, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland; Irvine, California; and Seaside, Florida, serving as

some of the better-known examples. Preceding these efforts, however, were a number

of small, privately planned suburbs, including Riverside, Illinois, a planned community

 outside Chicago that was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1868–69,

and Radburn, New Jersey, built in 1929 according to plans conceived by Clarence Stein

and Henry Wright. There are a few outstanding examples of planned new cities in such

widely scattered places as India (where Le Corbusier designed Chandigarh), the 

Middle East, and South America.

In Asia the emerging industrial economies of the post-World War

II period produced large, densely populated, congested

metropolises. Some Asian governments addressed the problems

of rapid expansion through massive construction projects that 

encompassed skyscraper office buildings, shopping malls,

luxury apartments and hotels, and new airports.

In Shanghai, in the span of little more than a decade, the Chinese

government created Pudong New Area—a planned central business

district along with factories and residences in Pudong, across the

Huangpu River from Shanghai’s old downtown core. Many developing

countries, however, are still preoccupied with political and economic

problems and have made little progress toward establishing an

environmental planning function capable of avoiding the insalubrious

conditions that characterized Western cities in the 19th century.

THE SCOPE OF PLANNING
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the influence of planning

broadened within Europe as various national and local statutes

increasingly guided new development. European governments became

directly involved with housing provision for the working class, and

decisions concerning the siting of housing construction shaped urban

growth.
In the United States, local planning in the form of zoning began

with the 1916 New York City zoning law, but it was not until the 

Great Depression of the 1930s that the federal government

intervened in matters of housing and land use. During World War

II, military mobilization and the need to coordinate defense

production caused the development of the most extensive

planning frameworks ever seen in the United States and Britain.

COMPETING MODELS
Starting in the 20th century, a number of urban planning theories came into

prominence and, depending on their popularity and longevity, influenced the

appearance and experience of the urban landscape. The primary goal of city

 planning in the mid-20th century was comprehensiveness. An increasing

recognition of the interdependence of various aspects of the city led to the

realization that land use, transport, and housing needed to be designed in relation

to each other. 
The modernist model, involving wholesale demolition and reconstruction under

the direction of planning officials isolated from public opinion, came under

fierce attack both intellectually and on the ground. Most important in

undermining support for the modernist approach was urbanologist Jane Jacobs.

In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), she

sarcastically described redeveloped downtowns and housing projects as 

comprising the “radiant garden city”—a sly reference to the influence of 

Le Corbusier’s “towers in the park” (from his cité radieuse concept) and

Ebenezer Howard’s antiurban garden city. 

By the end of the 20th century, planning orthodoxy in the United States and

Europe began to take Jacobs’s arguments into account. New emphasis was placed

on the rehabilitation of existing buildings, historical preservation, adaptive reuse of

obsolete structures, mixed-use development, and the “24-hour city”—i.e., districts

where a variety of functions would create around-the-clock activity. Major new

projects, while still sometimes involving demolition of occupied housing or

commercial structures, increasingly came to be built on vacant or “brownfields”

sites such as disused railroad yards, outmoded port facilities, and abandoned

factory districts.
CONTEMPORARY
PLANNING
The ways in which planning operated at the beginning of the 21st century did not conform to a

single model of either a replicable process or a desirable outcome. Within Europe and the United

States, calls for a participatory mode—one that involved residents most likely to be affected by

change in the planning process for their locales—came to be honoured in some cities but not in

others. The concept of participatory planning has spread to the rest of the world, although it

remains limited in its adoption. Generally, the extent to which planning involves public

participation reflects the degree of democracy enjoyed in each location. Where government is 

authoritarian, so is planning. 
NEW PLURALISM
Universal principles regarding appropriate planning have increasingly broken

down as a consequence of several trends. First, intellectual arguments against a

“one plan fits all” approach have gained ascendancy. The original consensus on

the form of orderly development embodying separation of uses and standardized

construction along modernist lines has been replaced by sensitivity to local

differences and greater willingness to accept democratic input.

Second, it has become widely recognized that, even where the

imposition of standards might be desirable, many places lack the

resources to attain them. Within the developing world, informal markets

and settlements, formerly condemned by planners, now appear to be

inevitable and often appropriate in serving the needs of poor 

communities. Planners in these contexts, influenced by international aid

 institutions, increasingly endeavour to upgrade squatter settlements

and street markets rather than eliminate them in the name of progress.
Third, political forces espousing the free market have forced

planners to seek market-based solutions to problems such as

pollution and the provision of public services. This has led to

privatization of formerly publicly owned facilities and utilities

and to the trading of rights to develop land and to emit

pollutants in place of a purely regulatory approach. 

Planning in its origins had an implicit premise that a well-designed,

comprehensively planned city would be a socially ameliorative one. In other

words, it tended toward environmental determinism. The goals of planning have

subsequently become more modest, and the belief that the physical environment

 can profoundly affect social behaviour has diminished. Nevertheless, planning as

practice and discipline relies upon public policy as an instrument for producing a

more equitable and attractive environment that, while not radically altering 

human behaviour, nonetheless contributes to improvements in the quality of life

 for a great number of people.