Practicing Utopia – An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement - Hardcover

Wakeman, Rosemary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022634603X ISBN 13: 9780226346038

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2016

Synopsis

The typical town springs up around a natural resource―a river, an ocean, an exceptionally deep harbor―or in proximity to a larger, already thriving town. Not so with “new towns,” which are created by decree rather than out of necessity and are often intended to break from the tendencies of past development. New towns aren’t a new thing―ancient Phoenicians named their colonies Qart Hadasht, or New City―but these utopian developments saw a resurgence in the twentieth century.

In Practicing Utopia, Rosemary Wakeman gives us a sweeping view of the new town movement as a global phenomenon. From Tapiola in Finland to Islamabad in Pakistan, Cergy-Pontoise in France to Irvine in California, Wakeman unspools a masterly account of the golden age of new towns, exploring their utopian qualities and investigating what these towns can tell us about contemporary modernization and urban planning. She presents the new town movement as something truly global, defying a Cold War East-West dichotomy or the north-south polarization of rich and poor countries. Wherever these new towns were located, whatever their size, whether famous or forgotten, they shared a utopian lineage and conception that, in each case, reveals how residents and planners imagined their ideal urban future.

About this title

About the Author

Rosemary Wakeman is professor of history at Fordham University. She is the author of A Modern History of European Cities: 1815 to the Present as well as The Heroic City: Paris, 1945-1958 and Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement, the latter two also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Practicing Utopia

An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement

By Rosemary Wakeman

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-34603-8

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
ONE / The Origins of the New Town Movement, 
TWO / The Futurology of the Ordinary, 
THREE / Exporting Utopia, 
FOUR / Cybernetic Cities, 
FIVE / Towns of Tomorrow, 
SIX / Architecture for the Space Age, 
Conclusion: New Towns in the Twenty-First Century, 
Notes, 
Selected Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Origins of the New Town Movement

From the very beginning, new towns shared a complicated birthright. In traditional planning narratives, they all traced their lineage back to Ebenezer Howard's garden city movement. But this pedigree was very selective: by the mid-twentieth century, Howard's radical socialist program and cooperative vision were already consigned to the curiosity cabinet. The garden city had become an Arcadian reverie that more than anything represented a longing for the past. Yet this "garden" imagery remained one of the taproots of the new town movement through the end of the twentieth century, making it a blend of progressive, yet conservative ideology that hindered thinking about cities as much as it helped. Claiming origins in the garden city also sidestepped the more problematic influences on urban and regional planning that had intervened in the years after Howard's groundbreaking proposal. In truth, planning new towns was deeply rooted in the experience of colonialism, war, and military policy, and the expansion of state authority. It was wrapped up in successive visions of regionalism that dramatically enlarged the scale and power of settlement strategies. Tracking the origins of the new town movement thus takes us initially to Howard's legendary garden city of Letchworth, England, but it quickly moves us in other directions. Along with the British garden city movement, German and Soviet reform initiatives were vital to the birth of the new town movement, as was the American experience. Accordingly, the examples drawn in this chapter focus on these histories and weave the struggle for urban reform directly into the crises of the mid-twentieth century.

Garden Cities of Tomorrow

In the original formulation of Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902), Howard had suggested a radical transformation of the social and physical environments. The ghastly slums of the turn of the century would be left behind. The working classes would find new life in self-sufficient planned communities that balanced individual and community needs. These hopes underlay all utopian urban experiments and were the core ambitions of the entire new town movement. Howard's version suggested a population of thirty-two thousand people living on one thousand acres of land. The city would be a locally managed, limited-liability company that attracted light industry, jobs, and services. Land would be owned in common. In the pioneering spirit of homesteading, people would build their own homes and open their own small-scale shops.

Howard was influenced by an amalgam of ideas, from early utopian socialism and cooperative movements to anarchist Peter Kropotkin's belief that new technologies would allow the dispersal of populations away from the horrors of the industrial city. The garden city trusted the restorative qualities of nature and the ways it could be merged with vernacular culture to create a perfected living environment. It offered

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022634603X
• ISBN 13: 9780226346038
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 392