New town
A New town or planned community or planned city is a city, town, or community that was designed from scratch, and grew up more or less following the plan. Many of the world's capital cities are planned cities, notably Washington, DC in the United States, BrasÃÂlia in Brazil, Canberra in Australia, and New Delhi in India and Islamabad in Pakistan. It was also common in European colonization of the Americas to build according to a plan either on fresh ground or on the ruins of earlier Amerindian cities.
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However the building of new towns in the UK is not purely a modern occurrence. The town of Winchelsea is said to be the first new town in Britain, constructed to a grid system under the instructions of King Edward I in 1280, and largely completed by 1292.
There are five post-war new towns in Scotland: Cumbernauld, East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Irvine and Livingston.
Aerial view of Levittown, Pennsylvania circa 1959
In the early history of America, planned communities were quite common: Jamestown, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and Annapolis are examples of this trend. Washington, DC and Austin, Texas are unique, having been carved out of the wilderness to serve as capital cities. (The only other city in the world with this distinction is BrasÃÂlia, Brazil).
Greenbelt, Maryland, which was built in the 1930s, was one of a series of planned communities built during that era. The Levittowns - in Long Island, Pennsylvania and New Jersey - typified the planned communities of the 1950s and early 1960s. The era of the modern New Town began in 1963 with the creation of Reston, Virginia, which was begun just a year before Columbia, Maryland.
France
A program of new towns (French villes nouvelles) was developed in the mid-1960s in France. Nine villes nouvelles were created.United Kingdom
The term is used in the UK, in the main, to refer to the towns developed after World War II under the New Towns Act of 1946. Following the war, a number of towns (eventually numbering 28) were designated as New Towns and were developed to house the large numbers of people who had lost homes during the War. The idea in the UK grew from the earlier attempts at a Garden City in Letchworth and Welwyn in Hertfordshire, England following on the ideas of Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes. In the 1960s a number of New towns were built in the Southeast of England including Milton Keynes, famous (or perhaps infamous) for its car oriented layout featuring many roundabouts and grid based road system (unusual in the UK). Washington was another, contrasting with the planned city of Washington, DC. In the 1990s an experimental "new town" developed by The Prince of Wales was started at Poundbury in Dorset.United States
See also
External links