Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement
Rosemary Wakeman
Abstract
This book investigates the golden age of new town building in the mid to late twentieth century. It argues that the magnitudeof new town construction, its geographic extent, and the discourse about new towns marked it as a commanding intellectual movement. It represented a rich corpus of ideas and influences that carried forward the inheritance of urban utopianism and was instrumental in defining modernization and the aspirations of the late twentieth century. The book considers new towns as a dynamic concept that was implemented across the globe by a transnational planning culture. It first e ... More
This book investigates the golden age of new town building in the mid to late twentieth century. It argues that the magnitudeof new town construction, its geographic extent, and the discourse about new towns marked it as a commanding intellectual movement. It represented a rich corpus of ideas and influences that carried forward the inheritance of urban utopianism and was instrumental in defining modernization and the aspirations of the late twentieth century. The book considers new towns as a dynamic concept that was implemented across the globe by a transnational planning culture. It first examines the new towns of the post Second World War reconstruction years and the export of the garden city ideal as postcolonial strategy, and thenthe second great wave of new towns in the 1960s and 1970s influenced by cybernetics, systems analysis, and the Space Age. Evidence ranges across transnational intellectual debates and a corpus of new town plans and visual imagery that mapped out urban utopia. Case-studies are drawn from Europe, the Soviet Union and the United States as well as new towns in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
Keywords:
new town,
utopia,
ideal cities,
urban planning,
regional planning,
urban theory,
urban history,
space age,
cybernetics,
systems analysis
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226346038 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: September 2016 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226346175.001.0001 |
