Customer Reviews

New Towns and the Suburban Dream: Ideology and Utopia in Planning and Development (Kennikat Press national university publications)

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This 1977 book is a collection of fourteen essays on a variety of topics related to the "New Towns" movement (one of the authors notes, "New Towns, of course, are really only another name for Garden Cities or greenbelt cities").

In addition to discussions of Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of To-morrow proposals, they analyze other alternatives, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's "Broadacre City" proposals (see Wright's book, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Living City). An author notes, "Broadacre City was a more detailed utopia than Garden City. Wright had drawn not only the ground pattern (one acre to the individual) but also planned homes, buildings, farms, and automobiles. He also clearly specified the activities that would be permitted."

One essay argues, "The new town movement is essentially decentralist. The physical specifications virtually dictate that the planners look away from the city to the periphery and beyond, for the large virgin sites that are called for are not to be found within the present metropolitan area." "In this best of both worlds there is to be bustle without noise, concentration without confusion, people without traffic, excitement without danger. What the planners mean to do, in short, is to isolate each of the good qualities of the city from its context and reconstitute it in suburbia without its companion disadvantages. In a word, urbanity without cities."

However, the problems with many actual "New Towns" are detailed, as well. One essay states, "Ideally, new towns should be relatively small, manageable, and workable microcosms of the metropolitan community with all its age, class, ethnic, and racial heterogeneity and, yes, its share of responsibility for the attendant social problems. But almost all commercial new town proposals ... cater to homogeneous segments of the population, middle-class people in the child-bearing and rearing years." And in a footnote on the first page, Allen notes that "In late 1976, most of the thirteen HUD-backed, privately developed new towns were in severe financial difficulty and several were imminently to be taken over by HUD."

Although more than thirty years old, this book is still of interest to those intersted in New Towns, Garden Cities, Green-Belt Cities, the New Urbanism, and urban planning.