"The Social-function concept of the New Town planned communities"

Planned Communities

The Second World War had changed everything and the

new thinking behind the large scale schemes brought a

sense of national comfort and reassurance. During the war

a coalition government and the military forces had exer-

cised power in economic and logistical thinking on a scale

previously unknown, or experienced. Now this mode was

to be applied to ameliorative peacetime reconstruction ef-

forts. The planned communities discussed here are the New

Towns built by the Development Corporations under the

1946 New Towns Act. The chapter isolates the stated objec-

tive of the New Towns, that they were to be self-contained

and balanced communities, and does not focus on the much

more heterogeneous group of expanded towns built under

the provision of the 1952 Town Development Act. The

1946 Act served to limit the role of local council\govern-

ment in the development process by handing over the job

of building and planning to special ad hoc Development

Corporations, insulated to a remarkable degree from both

central and local government pressures and comparable

to corporations set up to run the nationalized industries.

The task of central government was essentially limited to

subsidizing the provision of infrastructure like roads and

sewers, whatever was beyond the capacity of local authori-

ties to supply.

What differentiates the culture of the “planned commu-

nity” from other efforts at city-building, or urbanism, is

its exclusive focus on a complete, well-designed, self-con-

tained unit of settlement. Planned communities, ranging

from neighbourhood units to towns to complete cities, are

united by a common conceptual query, whether a human

settlement can be planned coherently all at once. Advo-

cates like Ebenezer Howard or Frederic J Osborn thought

so. Planning theorist C.B. Purdom wrote in 1921 that new

towns should be “planned to make convenient, healthy,

and beautiful places to live and work in.”

So what was the role of ‘the planner’ in this scenario of

increased state power in the post-war years, and what was

going to be planned? Abercrombie and Forshaw’s The

County of London Plan (1944) and the Greater London

Plan 1944 generated national and international debate

about just such concerns.

The task of creating the ‘Welfare State’ lead the Labour Party to establish four environmental Acts, with devolved/delegated powers rather than centralized ones.

The New Towns Act 1946, allowed the construction of new towns.

The Agriculture Act 1947, supported agriculture in its post-war expansion and made farmland desirable for farming again––rather than for development, like in the 1930s.

The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, allowed the parks and the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and encouraged recreational access to the countryside.

The Town and Country Planning Act 1947, which with modifications contains the essentials of the system today.

Under the aegis of the Development Corporation the

new town planner had a much more active and control-

ling function, responsible for almost every aspect of the

development. In conjunction with the Department of

Trade and Industry (DTI) the Development Corporation

largely determined what industry would come to town and

the location of its premises. They determined the siting,

density, and priority of factories and offices. They planned

and contracted-out building the residential areas. Homes

were separated from industry; factories, warehouses were

in industrial zones and offices in the town centre. This was

an astonishing procedure of interaction between differ-

ent the actors and not the usual route found in the normal

process of planning and development. More pointedly,

for the Industrial Selection Scheme by which the offer of a

new house in a new town was linked to securing a job offer

there, the planner effectively pre-selected the occupants

for the housing being built––thereby abolishing the role of

the market altogether.

The reason for such a degree of control seen in the pro-

planning years immediately after the war was the re-

markable scale of national development. Under ordinary

circumstances in the normal development process, the

planning office would work in a piecemeal fashion. But

with the new planned communities the approach was

sweeping. Here the grand design––the masterplan––was

paramount. And herein lies a fundamental caveat of its

success and failure, its principal source of innovation may

unwittingly have contributed to its downfall\ shortfall, that

culturally the concept of a new settlement conceived in

a sweeping fashion is highly anachronistic to the English

Picturesque imagination. The national sense of urgency

behind the new town legislation, planned for specific target

populations, masterplanned with rigid layout schemes with

a greater measure of design coherence than was previously

evident, although tolerated in the years immediately fol-

lowing the war, is otherwise outside the cultural imagina-

tion of town-making. At no time before had developers and

planners sat down to design communities of 50,000 all at

once!

In 1921 Purdom had insisted on “something more than an

obvious reply [to the question of new settlement]; we want

an illustration in detail of what is meant.” Purdom wanted

a masterplan! The paradoxical relationship of articulat-

ing a highly structured lay out, holistically conceived and

implemented, with an acute application of the details of

urban form and its workings to create a better living condi-

tions, and what a dramatic conceptual leap that was, may

be something to take into account when reflecting upon

today’s debates.

Illustrated with image from RIBA photo library

The fi rst wave of new towns fall into two groups: those vis-

ibly intended to achieve the ambitions of Ebenezer Howard

and Raymond Unwin, the planned dispersal of population

from overcrowded urban cores. Howard’s principles, prox-

imity to the countryside, comfortable walking distances in

town, the public realm, a scrupulous regard to density, a

‘community purse’, carefully attempt to balance the affi li-

ation of town and countryside. Unwin stated, “It is not an

easy matter to combine the charm of town and country.”

All eight “Mark One New Towns” designated for this

purpose, located around London, share similarities in

their social intent, however their locations and objectives

were widely diverse. By 1971 there were twenty-one New

Towns in England, two in Wales, and fi ve in Scotland; they

housed roughly 1.5 million people, about one in every sixty

of the British population lived in a new town. A respect-

able achievement after only a quarter of a century of effort.

The second wave of New Towns marks a signifi cant break

in progress. For eleven years after 1950 no New Towns

were designated. Instead the Conservative Government of

1951 put all its emphasis on the 1952 Towns Development

Act, and announced in 1957 that no new towns would

be built. Only in the early 1960s was the policy reversed.

From 1961 to 1970 eleven towns were designated. With

the exception of Newtown in mid-Wales, these towns were

intended to solve overspill problems. Three were added to

the eight existing fi rst wave around London: Milton Key-

nes, Peterborough and Northampton, designated in 1967.

In the West Midlands, Telford was designated in 1963,

and Redditch in 1964. In Merseyside, Skelmersdale was

designated in 1961, and Runcorn in 1964. In Greater Man-

chester, Warrington was designate in 1968, and Central

Lancashire in 1970. In Tyneside, Washington was desig-

nated in 1964 and enjoyed special incentives. So of the 21

new towns in England, eighteen were conceived to provide

for overspill.

Commute distance of a new town from a larger urban

centre represented a contradictory association. One desire

was to keep the towns as close in as possible for reasons of

economic and cultural benefi t. The other impulse, on the

part of the planners, was to provide physical and social

separation of the new town from the parent conurbation.

When the South-East Study (1964) suggested new plan-

ning guidelines for the region around London, it proposed

that the New Towns be located considerably further afi eld,

fi fty to eighty miles away, to maintain functional separa-

tion from the capital. Planned new town communities

were not innately anti-urban, nor were they meant to be

suburban. They should be regarded instead as something

defi ning of urbanism itself. They play an essential func-

tion in articulating\grappling\challenging the nuances of

intensity––and therefore density––of city life. Still some of

the most outspoken qualms about the success of the New

Towns, whether the psychologies of “new town blues” or

the sociology of kinship, have been couched in terms of the

ties with the existing, primary home, cities.

Chronology of new town development was an important

factor in regard to size. The Reith Committee had recom-

mended a rather modest population range for the fi rst wave

of new towns between 30,000 and 50,000. The twelve

“housing relocation” new towns on predominately green-

fi eld sites retained this target populations in keeping with

Howard’s estimation of 32,000. Very few however were

genuine greenfi eld sites like Newton Aycliffe. The second

wave of new towns from the 1960s show a break with this

guiding principle, there is an increase in the size of the

towns and a sharp increase in the population. A typical

new town of the 1960s was likely to start with an existing

town of 100,000 and build up two-or threefold.

The second wave of new towns was much more diversifi ed.

Several of the towns followed the principles of towns built

for overspill: Redditch for Birmingham, Skelmersdale and

Runcorn on Merseyside, Washington for Tyneside with

modest increases to planned target-populations. This was in

keeping with the theories of the time that held that a town

of this size was needed to provide critical mass adequate

for shopping and other services. Peterborough and North-

ampton, and Warrington departed from this formula. These

towns had substantial populations that were increased by

a factor of two. Even more striking was the example of

Central Lancashire, a region comprising several established

towns with a combined population of 240,000 expanded to

a target of 430,000. With the second wave, the new town

had evolved into a concept of a new town added to an old

town, and then to the concept of a planned city region.

The concept of self-contained community

The idea of being “self-contained” meant providing the

needs of everyday living, work and shopping and other

services. “Balance” meant establishing the right mixture

of different social and economic groups. These two aspira-

tions of provision and mix were claimed as a virtue; social

polarization was what the new towns set out to avoid. The

overall concerted effort of the planned community was to

bring about better standards of living for all classes, espe-

cially the working class.

“Some fashions in

new-town building

then have changed.

But some have been

more enduring. In

particular, virtually all

the new towns have

been designated with

the idea––to quote the

words of the Reith

Committee––that they

should be “self-con-

tained and balanced

communities for

working and living.”

“Self-containment” is an objective that came down through

the Garden City legacy. Howard promoted a variety of

employment, services and amenity that would serve to

hamper costly and tiring commuting. The Reith Commit-

tee was aware that such an objective required balanced

consideration, a full range of job types provided locally, for

example head offi ces, administrative and research facilities,

and governmental departments, as well as factory jobs. The

wider the range of employment opportunities the greater

the range of people that would be attracted, workers of all

kinds, who would in turn encourage a range of services

and stimulate commercial fl ow. Hence the two objectives

were mutually reinforcing and created conditions that dif-

ferentiated the town from the suburb: a community must

have some qualities of urbanism––or the potential to foster

the conditions of the city––and the development must be

purposefully designed, not merely improvised. A high

level of self-containment was achievable because new-

town planners were in a position to ensure it: they selected

and situated the most of the employment and the housing,

and they could be discriminating in their choices. Only in

a new town did people fi nd as part of its policy an agency

(the Development Corporation or the New Towns Com-

mission) that helped them fi nd a home in the same area

of their place of work. With the discussion of increased

mobility and car ownership and the widening search both

for jobs and homes in the chapter on Milton Keynes, the

weighting of containment and balance is one that will be

returned to. more to come…

Towards an urban renaissance

Despite these important points, there is no real sense that

the lessons of the New Towns are being objectively assessed

in the current debates about urban sustainability. The La-

bour Government’s ‘Urban Task Force’ has declared himself

an opponent of English low-density development and new

towns. It is unsurprising therefore that the Urban Task

Force Report (1998) ignores Milton Keynes. Just because

the new towns start with a focus on the formal masterp-

lan––the layout, the neighbourhood unit, the location of

the centre and industry and roads, and its pattern––from

scratch, they are no less relevant than established tradi-

tional networks or the dense concentrations of well-estab-

lished historic districts. Designers of the planned com-

munities thought in terms of establishing new patterns of

urbanism. And although they were largely utopian in their

aspiration the schemes focus on the complete formation of

new habitations from the ground up: the family home, the

neighbourhood unit, the town or city.

The implications of designing planning communities on a

clean slate are signifi cant…

Sustainable Communities

The specter of debate about sustainable communities, the

particular balance between form and restrained movement

that shapes the definitions of “sustainable” were part and

parcel of the foundations that made up new town planning

and design.

But the extreme difficulty, even impossibility, of any

direct reference to sustainable communities (until the late

1970s or 1980s), on the part of architecture to the self-

conscious aspects of human life––in spite of the obvious

fact that architecture is designed by self-conscious human

beings–– doesn’t suggest it wasn’t always there. Instead it

is much more part of the explanation for the variety and

the many facets of architecture that have been tried out in

the new towns for sixty years, from Gibberd’s reliance on

Unwin’s formal aesthetic setting to James Stirling’s over-

sized structures which seemed to be out of concordance

with simple domestic life yet in keeping with the big ideas

the new towns attempted to capture. From the harmonic

proportions found on abstract facades in Peterlee meant to

make buildings and human experiences of the coal mines

commensurate, to photovoltaic or solar thermal panels on

the rooftops of Milton Keynes that account for life itself:

the heat and light of nature. In each of these cases what

was criticized were the terms of disjuncture felt, or some

perceived asymmetry between life and architecture.

Runaway scale of 1960s regional new towns might have

gone against the grain of the small-is-beautiful satellite

communities conceived by Ebenezer Howard. But with

today’s expected world population increase from 6.2 bil-

lion to 9.3 by 2050, Britain’s population is also set to swell.

After an episode of stagnation, the birth rate is increasing;

and population growth in migration is up sharply from EU

Accession Countries, like Poland. And as predicted in the

early 1960s, people will gravitate to concentrated urban

centers.

New towns were designed to evolve from start points

notably at opposite ends of the spectrum: the job and the

house, the house in the street, the neighborhood unit, the

neighborhood center to the scale of the town center on the

one hand. And New Towns were conceived from a stra-

tegic level inward/ downwards: from macro resource and

economic planning, to the relocation of industry, outline

plans represented by blocks of discrete land use labeled

“Industry” or “Residential” or “Landscape”, to footpaths and

shopping areas. Both ends of the spectrum depend on the

result of evolution to develop. One can argue that the way

to approach the design of sustainable communities is from

both directions at once, from macro to site-specific detailed

design simultaneously. However in both directions the

general objectives remain the same.

Sustainable transportation

The commonly held definition of ‘sustainable transporta-

tion’ is transport which aids the mobility and freedom

of one generation without compromising the future of

another. The key to a sustainable transportation system is

the establishment of a hierarchy of means that gives prior-

ity to the pedestrian and the cyclist, and facilitates the ease

of exchange and convenience between different modes of

bus, train and car use while not degrading the public realm

or the environment. Incorporating sustainable transporta-

tion into the urban design is likely a greater environmental

imperative now than it was when the new towns were

originally conceived. The basis of the New Town changed

in two other ways as well: that at least half of the houses

built were to be private enterprise for owner-occupiers,

and their design would accommodate 1.5 cars per house-

hold. That said, major capital investment in infrastructure

was planned holistically from the outset in all new town

master plans.

Renewable resources

Setting the standard for achievement of a sustainable en-

ergy policy

CHP MK town center building Glenn Howells Architects

with shared CHP

Water resource, SUDS, landscaping; building reservoirs;

establishing cleaner waste management systems

The choice of construction materials play a big role in a

commitment to sustainability, and have always played an

important part in the making of the new towns, whether

in matters of design appropriateness or efficiency. New

Town architecture was often historically the testing ground

for the use of materials and construction methods, which

sometimes went awry.

…