New towns movement

The new town movement refers to towns that were built after World War II and that have been purposefully planned, developed and built as a remedy to overcrowding and congestion in some instances, and to scattered ad hoc settlements in others. The main reason for it was to decongest larger industrialized cities, rehousing people in freshly built, new and fully planned towns that were completely self-sufficient and provided for the community.

In 1918, writing at a time when nineteenth century sanitary advances had revealed how badly off people in urban environments were and, owing to pioneers such as Patrick Geddes, the relationship between social issues and town planning was slowly being realised, Frederick Osborn refers to urban problems collectively as the ‘urban disease’ The urban disease, a by-product of the industrial revolution, was brought on by a vicious cycle whereby industry chose to set up near population bases to ensure labour demands could be met which in turn attracted rural migrants seeking work to move into the city prompting further industry and so on. This resulted in greater pollution in the city, higher populations, and denser living conditions. Moreover, rural areas declining rapidly due to loss of population were left to decay.

Furthermore, there were no powers in place to stop prosperous families moving to open spaces or from industry growing in the centres. Fringe growth was vigorous and existing centres were left to deteriorate. Accordingly, those who moved to new fringe suburbs to escape the congestion were in fact “bolstering the very process that caused them to move away.”

Although aspirations of dispersing great cities are as old as the industrial revolution itself, it was not until 1817 that the first model communities were proposed by social reformer Robert Owen to address overcrowded towns. Inspired by John Bellers’s 1695 proposal for a College of Industry, a colony for the poor enabling disadvantaged people to work and their children to be educated, Owen proposed small, self-contained communities of about twelve hundred people reliant on agriculture but with some other industry. However, his plans “foundered under the heavy weight of revolutionary ideas”

Further model community ideas continued to arise but were each dismissed owing to the perception that they were unconvincing as business ventures. Enter Ebenezer Howard, creator of the Garden City Movement, who successfully founded Letchworth Garden City (1903) and proved that new towns could be economically viable. This was affirmed by Bernard Shaw, co-founder of the London School of Economics, who referred to his investments in the garden city movement as “entirely satisfactory, both economically and morally.”

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Wikipedia