The British new towns: lessons for the world from the new-town experiment

Abstract

For more than a century the idea of building new towns has captured the imagination of urban planners. Britain has been a centre of both theory and practice, particularly in the early years of the planned-town idea and in the golden period of new-town development from the Second World War to the middle of the 1970s (Forsyth and Peiser, 2020; Wakeman, 2016). While in the last decades of the twentieth century such developments became less common globally, a recent resurgence of activity in Asia, and increasingly elsewhere, has brought new attention to the type. Even the UK has announced a new round of garden-style developments (UK Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government, 2018; National Health Service England, 2018).