The Potential of New Towns

The latest book in the Penn IUR/Penn Press City in the 21st Century series examines the potential for new towns—large, comprehensively planned developments on newly urbanized land—to address looming urban development challenges around the world. New Towns for the Twenty-First Century: A Guide to Planned Communities Worldwide brings together international and interdisciplinary contributors to examine new town design, planning, finances, management, governance, quality of life, and sustainability. Penn IUR interviewed editors Richard Peiser and Ann Forsyth on the implications of these projects around the world.

In your recent volume, you define new towns as large, planned developments on newly urbanized land. What do you see as the potential for this kind of urban development today?

Richard Peiser: The potential is enormous both in the United States and internationally, although for different reasons.  In developing countries, new towns are among the best solutions for rapid urbanization—people moving from the countryside to the city.  China, Hong Kong, Korea, and other Asian countries have been leaders in using new towns for comprehensively-planned expansion areas as well as satellite cites.  In the United States, new towns can help provide suitable relocation environments for upcoming climate-driven migrations away from low-lying, fire-prone, and other threatened areas.  However, the United States has no current new towns policy or plans in place to address large-scale urban movement.

Ann Forsyth: It is also important to say that new towns can come in a variety of sizes. In the book we developed an inventory of new towns started in the 20th century that had reached more than 30,000 by 2015. We picked that level reflecting Ebenezer Howard’s initial garden city idea and also to keep the list manageable. There were over 500 of them, many reaching into the hundreds of thousands in terms of population. However, many planned new settlements do not reach that threshold. Such smaller new towns are easier to build, particularly in places where land is more fragmented. Many new towns grow from the kernel of an existing settlement—this was the case with many of the classic British new towns. Rather than thinking of new towns as always enormous and decades in the making, new towns can be smaller and quicker to build. This may be useful when relocating people away from climate-change hazards. We also make the point that new town planning ideas can be transferred to other kinds of developments.

What advantages do new towns have over incremental urban development?

RP: New towns offer the opportunity to comprehensively plan all aspects of urban life—where people, live, work, and play.  At their best new towns offer the highest quality of living environments for accommodating urban growth.  They not only provide beautiful parks and access to nature as well as attractive and energetic urban centers and employment areas, but also they help ensure efficient delivery of public services including transportation, safety, education, wellness, hospitals, libraries, entertainment venues, and governance.  Incremental development at the scale of new towns can offer the same advantages, but in most cases, incremental development is focused on residential or other single uses.  It lacks the integration, comprehensiveness, and mixture of people and land uses that enable cities to capture people’s imaginations and allow their residents to enjoy the full range of amenities and activities.

AF: I agree with Rick here. However, there are pitfalls in building new towns as not all have lived up to their potential. New towns might be better than incremental development, or sprawl, but they have also been criticized as complex to build, boring, top-down, and homogenous. Some experimented with architectural design in a way that did not age well. Certainly, the best of the new towns manage to avoid such criticisms. Some, like Columbia Maryland, have resident associations not just governance for homeowners. Others, such as Almere in the Netherlands have a variety of architectural styles from the architecturally innovative to the comfortably traditional. However, new towns do vary quite a bit in quality.

You find that most new towns are built to deconcentrate metro areas and that, since 2000, China dominates this category.  Why is this?

AF: In the 20th century, and today, new towns are developed for two main reasons: economic development and managing urban growth. Economic development has been very important, particularly in places like Russia that dominated new town building in the early part of the 20th century. Industrial and science cities, and resource extraction towns, are examples of this type. China, with a fairly centralized planning system, built new towns to help urbanize efficiently. Typically, the new towns were developed really fast, as what we call “instant” new towns, so it isn’t clear how well they will age. However, it is a huge program allowing some experimentation.

RP: China has new town programs in many major cities.  Fulong Wu writes that they represent a formal approach to suburban development.  The Shanghai master plan (1999-2020) proposed consolidation of satellite towns in the suburbs into larger new towns “to form a multi-axis, multiplayer, and multinuclear structure. The purpose is to integrate industrial and residential development to increase the size of these settlements” (p. 159). Elsewhere, China essentially uses a new town approach for urban expansion—to build second downtowns and even third downtowns with surrounding mixed use development as in the case of Chengdu.  The new towns serve multiple purposes. They bring together scattered industrial development zones in the suburbs.  They use the property market to generate capital for infrastructure investment.  They represent a more advanced stage of suburban development in China.

What is the potential for new towns in the Global South. Many think that they are a means of escaping the problems of the rapidly urbanizing, informal settlement-dominant traditional cities in places like India and in some places in Africa. Do you agree?

 AF: This is a very interesting question and there are several different trends and opportunities. In India and parts of Africa the idea of smart or science cities has taken hold. In both locations there are new market-based developments. China has also been influential in Africa with Chinese developers active there building large developments that are architecturally similar to those in China.

In the book we outline some other options including the idea of revisiting the sites and services approach and developing the comprehensive infrastructure of a new town but having residents be able to self-build their own homes rather than purchase or rent them from a developer. This is just an idea at present but would focus on key social and physical infrastructure, from roads and green space to schools and employment. Residents could purchase or lease land on which to build housing over time. There are many of these kinds of programs around the world done more incrementally; here the innovation is to coordinate better so infrastructure does not lag.

RP: I agree that the new towns in the Global South are predominantly built for people who can afford homes built by the private market and are often enclaves for the upper middle class.  Sai Balakrishnan writes that the “new” new towns in India—built after liberalization in 1991 mainly in Special Economic Zones and as smart cities—are pragmatic solutions to urbanization.  Unlike the surrounding regions with their gaps in infrastructure, the new towns such as Lavasa offer high quality schools and sporting facilities as well as modern infrastructure—functional and clean cities with uninterrupted power, high-speed internet, drinkable tap water, and walkable layouts.  Governance of the new towns supports the notion of escape from not only informal settlements but also other maladies of Indian urban life.  Robert Reich calls the trend toward private new towns the “secession of the successful,” seceding from public services and public life into their own privatized enclaves (p. 229).  However, where government takes a more active role in new town development as in Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea, there is more social housing and better diversification across the income spectrum.  In this way, new towns can be financially sound and socially inclusive.

Ann Forsyth is the Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Planning and Director of the Master in Urban Planning Program at the Harvard School of Design. Trained in planning and architecture, she works mainly on the social aspects of physical planning and urban development. Her current research focuses on developing healthier places in a suburbanizing world, with overlapping emphases on aging and planned communities.

Richard Peiser is the Michael D. Spear Professor of Real Estate Development and Area Head of Real Estate and the Built Environment at the Harvard School of Design. His primary research has focused on developing an understanding of the response of real estate developers to the marketplace and to the institutional environment in which they operate, particularly in the areas of urban redevelopment, affordable housing, and suburban sprawl.