Planned Communities The task of creating the Welfare State lead the Labour

Party to establish four environmental Acts, with devolved/

delegated powers rather than centralized ones.

The Second World War had changed everything and the The New Towns Act 1946, allowed the construction of new
new thinking behind the large scale schemes brought a towns.

sense of national comfort and reassurance. During the war

The Agriculture Act 1947, supported agriculture in its post-
a coalition government and the military forces had exer- war expansion and made farmland desirable for farming
cised power in economic and logistical thinking on a scale againrather than for development, like in the 1930s.

previously unknown, or experienced. Now this mode was

The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act
to be applied to ameliorative peacetime reconstruction ef- 1949, allowed the parks and the Areas of Outstanding
forts. The planned communities discussed here are the New Natural Beauty and encouraged recreational access to the
Towns built by the Development Corporations under the countryside.

1946 New Towns Act. The chapter isolates the stated objec-
The Town and Country Planning Act 1947, which with
tive of the New Towns, that they were to be self-contained modications contains the essentials of the system today.
and balanced communities, and does not focus on the much
more heterogeneous group of expanded towns built under
the provision of the 1952 Town Development Act. The
1946 Act served to limit the role of local council\govern-
ment in the development process by handing over the job
of building and planning to special ad hoc Development
Corporations, insulated to a remarkable degree from both
central and local government pressures and comparable
to corporations set up to run the nationalized industries.
The task of central government was essentially limited to
subsidizing the provision of infrastructure like roads and
sewers, whatever was beyond the capacity of local authori-
ties to supply.

What differentiates the culture of the planned commu-
nity from other efforts at city-building, or urbanism, is
its exclusive focus on a complete, well-designed, self-con-
tained unit of settlement. Planned communities, ranging
from neighbourhood units to towns to complete cities, are
united by a common conceptual query, whether a human
settlement can be planned coherently all at once. Advo-
cates like Ebenezer Howard or Frederic J Osborn thought
so. Planning theorist C.B. Purdom wrote in 1921 that new
towns should be planned to make convenient, healthy,
and beautiful places to live and work in.
So what was the role of the planner in this scenario of
increased state power in the post-war years, and what was
going to be planned? Abercrombie and Forshaws The
County of London Plan (1944) and the Greater London
Plan 1944 generated national and international debate
about just such concerns.
Under the aegis of the Development Corporation the paramount. And herein lies a fundamental caveat of its
new town planner had a much more active and control- success and failure, its principal source of innovation may
ling function, responsible for almost every aspect of the unwittingly have contributed to its downfall\ shortfall, that
development. In conjunction with the Department of culturally the concept of a new settlement conceived in
Trade and Industry (DTI) the Development Corporation a sweeping fashion is highly anachronistic to the English
largely determined what industry would come to town and Picturesque imagination. The national sense of urgency
the location of its premises. They determined the siting, behind the new town legislation, planned for specic target
density, and priority of factories and ofces. They planned populations, masterplanned with rigid layout schemes with
and contracted-out building the residential areas. Homes a greater measure of design coherence than was previously
were separated from industry; factories, warehouses were evident, although tolerated in the years immediately fol-
in industrial zones and ofces in the town centre. This was lowing the war, is otherwise outside the cultural imagina-
an astonishing procedure of interaction between differ- tion of town-making. At no time before had developers and
ent the actors and not the usual route found in the normal planners sat down to design communities of 50,000 all at
process of planning and development. More pointedly, once!
for the Industrial Selection Scheme by which the offer of a
new house in a new town was linked to securing a job offer
there, the planner effectively pre-selected the occupants
for the housing being builtthereby abolishing the role of
Illustrated with image
the market altogether. from RIBA photo library
The reason for such a degree of control seen in the pro-
planning years immediately after the war was the re-
markable scale of national development. Under ordinary
circumstances in the normal development process, the
planning ofce would work in a piecemeal fashion. But
with the new planned communities the approach was
sweeping. Here the grand designthe masterplanwas

In 1921 Purdom had insisted on something more than an

obvious reply [to the question of new settlement]; we want
an illustration in detail of what is meant. Purdom wanted
a masterplan! The paradoxical relationship of articulat-
ing a highly structured lay out, holistically conceived and
implemented, with an acute application of the details of
urban form and its workings to create a better living condi-
tions, and what a dramatic conceptual leap that was, may
be something to take into account when reecting upon
todays debates.
The rst wave of new towns fall into two groups: those vis-
ibly intended to achieve the ambitions of Ebenezer Howard
and Raymond Unwin, the planned dispersal of population
from overcrowded urban cores. Howards principles, prox-
imity to the countryside, comfortable walking distances in
town, the public realm, a scrupulous regard to density, a
community purse, carefully attempt to balance the afli-
ation of town and countryside. Unwin stated, It is not an
easy matter to combine the charm of town and country.
All eight Mark One New Towns designated for this
purpose, located around London, share similarities in
their social intent, however their locations and objectives
were widely diverse. By 1971 there were twenty-one New
Towns in England, two in Wales, and ve in Scotland; they
housed roughly 1.5 million people, about one in every sixty
of the British population lived in a new town. A respect-
able achievement after only a quarter of a century of effort.
The second wave of New Towns marks a signicant break
in progress. For eleven years after 1950 no New Towns
were designated. Instead the Conservative Government of
1951 put all its emphasis on the 1952 Towns Development
Act, and announced in 1957 that no new towns would
be built. Only in the early 1960s was the policy reversed.
From 1961 to 1970 eleven towns were designated. With
the exception of Newtown in mid-Wales, these towns were
intended to solve overspill problems. Three were added to
the eight existing rst wave around London: Milton Key-
dening of urbanism itself. They play an essential func-
Towns, whether the psychologies of new town blues or
nes, Peterborough and Northampton, designated in 1967.
In the West Midlands, Telford was designated in 1963,
and Redditch in 1964. In Merseyside, Skelmersdale was
designated in 1961, and Runcorn in 1964. In Greater Man-
chester, Warrington was designate in 1968, and Central
Lancashire in 1970. In Tyneside, Washington was desig-
nated in 1964 and enjoyed special incentives. So of the 21
new towns in England, eighteen were conceived to provide
for overspill.
Commute distance of a new town from a larger urban
centre represented a contradictory association. One desire
was to keep the towns as close in as possible for reasons of
economic and cultural benet. The other impulse, on the
part of the planners, was to provide physical and social
separation of the new town from the parent conurbation.
When the South-East Study (1964) suggested new plan-
ning guidelines for the region around London, it proposed
a factor of two. Even more striking was the example of
that the New Towns be located considerably further aeld,
Central Lancashire, a region comprising several established
fty to eighty miles away, to maintain functional separa-
towns with a combined population of 240,000 expanded to
tion from the capital. Planned new town communities
a target of 430,000. With the second wave, the new town
were not innately anti-urban, nor were they meant to be
had evolved into a concept of a new town added to an old
suburban. They should be regarded instead as something
town, and then to the concept of a planned city region.
The concept of self-contained community
tion in articulating\grappling\challenging the nuances of
intensityand therefore densityof city life. Still some of
The idea of being self-contained meant providing the
the most outspoken qualms about the success of the New
needs of everyday living, work and shopping and other
services. Balance meant establishing the right mixture
the sociology of kinship, have been couched in terms of the
of different social and economic groups. These two aspira-
ties with the existing, primary home, cities.
tions of provision and mix were claimed as a virtue; social
polarization was what the new towns set out to avoid. The
Chronology of new town development was an important
overall concerted effort of the planned community was to
factor in regard to size. The Reith Committee had recom-
bring about better standards of living for all classes, espe-
mended a rather modest population range for the rst wave
cially the working class.
of new towns between 30,000 and 50,000. The twelve
housing relocation new towns on predominately green-
eld sites retained this target populations in keeping with
Howards estimation of 32,000. Very few however were Some fashions in
genuine greeneld sites like Newton Aycliffe. The second new-town building
wave of new towns from the 1960s show a break with this then have changed.
guiding principle, there is an increase in the size of the But some have been
towns and a sharp increase in the population. A typical more enduring. In
new town of the 1960s was likely to start with an existing particular, virtually all
town of 100,000 and build up two-or threefold. the new towns have
been designated with
The second wave of new towns was much more diversied. the ideato quote the
Several of the towns followed the principles of towns built words of the Reith
for overspill: Redditch for Birmingham, Skelmersdale and Committeethat they
Runcorn on Merseyside, Washington for Tyneside with should be self-con-
modest increases to planned target-populations. This was in tained and balanced
keeping with the theories of the time that held that a town communities for
of this size was needed to provide critical mass adequate working and living.
for shopping and other services. Peterborough and North-
ampton, and Warrington departed from this formula. These
towns had substantial populations that were increased by
Self-containment is an objective that came down through
the Garden City legacy. Howard promoted a variety of
employment, services and amenity that would serve to
hamper costly and tiring commuting. The Reith Commit-
tee was aware that such an objective required balanced
consideration, a full range of job types provided locally, for
example head ofces, administrative and research facilities,
and governmental departments, as well as factory jobs. The
wider the range of employment opportunities the greater
the range of people that would be attracted, workers of all
kinds, who would in turn encourage a range of services
and stimulate commercial ow. Hence the two objectives
were mutually reinforcing and created conditions that dif-
ferentiated the town from the suburb: a community must
have some qualities of urbanismor the potential to foster
the conditions of the cityand the development must be
purposefully designed, not merely improvised. A high
level of self-containment was achievable because new-
town planners were in a position to ensure it: they selected
and situated the most of the employment and the housing,
and they could be discriminating in their choices. Only in
a new town did people nd as part of its policy an agency
(the Development Corporation or the New Towns Com-
mission) that helped them nd a home in the same area
of their place of work. With the discussion of increased
mobility and car ownership and the widening search both
for jobs and homes in the chapter on Milton Keynes, the
weighting of containment and balance is one that will be
returned to. more to come
Towards an urban renaissance
Despite these important points, there is no real sense that
the lessons of the New Towns are being objectively assessed neighbourhood unit, the town or city.
in the current debates about urban sustainability. The La-
bour Governments Urban Task Force has declared himself The implications of designing planning communities on a
an opponent of English low-density development and new clean slate are signicant
towns. It is unsurprising therefore that the Urban Task
Force Report (1998) ignores Milton Keynes. Just because
the new towns start with a focus on the formal masterp-
lanthe layout, the neighbourhood unit, the location of
the centre and industry and roads, and its patternfrom
scratch, they are no less relevant than established tradi-
tional networks or the dense concentrations of well-estab-
lished historic districts. Designers of the planned com-
munities thought in terms of establishing new patterns of
urbanism. And although they were largely utopian in their
aspiration the schemes focus on the complete formation of
new habitations from the ground up: the family home, the
Sustainable Communities
The specter of debate about sustainable communities, the
particular balance between form and restrained movement
that shapes the denitions of sustainable were part and the heat and light of nature. In each of these cases what
parcel of the foundations that made up new town planning
and design.
But the extreme difculty, even impossibility, of any
direct reference to sustainable communities (until the late
1970s or 1980s), on the part of architecture to the self-
conscious aspects of human lifein spite of the obvious
fact that architecture is designed by self-conscious human
beings doesnt suggest it wasnt always there. Instead it
is much more part of the explanation for the variety and
the many facets of architecture that have been tried out in
the new towns for sixty years, from Gibberds reliance on
Unwins formal aesthetic setting to James Stirlings over-
sized structures which seemed to be out of concordance
with simple domestic life yet in keeping with the big ideas
the new towns attempted to capture. From the harmonic
proportions found on abstract facades in Peterlee meant to gone against the grain of the small-is-beautiful satellite to approach the design of sustainable communities is from
make buildings and human experiences of the coal mines communities conceived by Ebenezer Howard. But with both directions at once, from macro to site-specic detailed
commensurate, to photovoltaic or solar thermal panels on todays expected world population increase from 6.2 bil- design simultaneously. However in both directions the
the rooftops of Milton Keynes that account for life itself: lion to 9.3 by 2050, Britains population is also set to swell. general objectives remain the same.
After an episode of stagnation, the birth rate is increasing;
was criticized were the terms of disjuncture felt, or some and population growth in migration is up sharply from EU
perceived asymmetry between life and architecture. Accession Countries, like Poland. And as predicted in the
Runaway scale of 1960s regional new towns might have early 1960s, people will gravitate to concentrated urban
centers.
New towns were designed to evolve from start points
notably at opposite ends of the spectrum: the job and the
house, the house in the street, the neighborhood unit, the
neighborhood center to the scale of the town center on the
one hand. And New Towns were conceived from a stra-
tegic level inward/ downwards: from macro resource and
economic planning, to the relocation of industry, outline
plans represented by blocks of discrete land use labeled
Industry or Residential or Landscape, to footpaths and
shopping areas. Both ends of the spectrum depend on the
result of evolution to develop. One can argue that the way
Sustainable transportation
The commonly held denition of sustainable transporta-
tion is transport which aids the mobility and freedom
of one generation without compromising the future of
another. The key to a sustainable transportation system is
the establishment of a hierarchy of means that gives prior-
ity to the pedestrian and the cyclist, and facilitates the ease
of exchange and convenience between different modes of
bus, train and car use while not degrading the public realm
or the environment. Incorporating sustainable transporta-
tion into the urban design is likely a greater environmental
imperative now than it was when the new towns were
originally conceived. The basis of the New Town changed
in two other ways as well: that at least half of the houses
built were to be private enterprise for owner-occupiers,
and their design would accommodate 1.5 cars per house-
hold. That said, major capital investment in infrastructure
was planned holistically from the outset in all new town
master plans.
Renewable resources
Setting the standard for achievement of a sustainable en-
ergy policy
CHP MK town center building Glenn Howells Architects
with shared CHP
Water resource, SUDS, landscaping; building reservoirs;
establishing cleaner waste management systems
The choice of construction materials play a big role in a
commitment to sustainability, and have always played an
important part in the making of the new towns, whether
in matters of design appropriateness or efciency. New
Town architecture was often historically the testing ground
for the use of materials and construction methods, which
sometimes went awry.