Lock, Kathy, and Hugh Ellis. New Towns: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth
- PDF / 478,275 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 13 Downloads / 174 Views
Lock, Kathy, and Hugh Ellis. New Towns: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth RIBA Publishing 2020, 192 pp., ISBN 9781003020967 (E-book) Ann Forsyth1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
New Towns: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth is a stirring call to create a more comprehensive approach to socially mixed, environmentally friendly, and fiscally stable development in the UK, and particularly in England. This would involve returning to some of the original Garden City principles as well as learning from the 32 post-war British new towns. Lock and Ellis work at the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA), founded by Ebenezer Howard as the Garden Cities Association. Lock is Director of Communities and Frederic Osborn Fellow and Ellis is Director of Policy. They draw extensively on the TCPA’s work developing, evaluating, and advocating for garden cities and new towns to provide what they call “big-picture lessons the [new towns] programme offers us for 21stcentury place-making” (p. ix). The lessons from the UK new towns are not all lessons of success, but neither was the program a total failure as some assume. The legacy of the program involves comprehensive communities housing 2.8 million people, 4.3% of the UK population, in what are typically mixed use, socially mixed areas, with larger than average proportions of green space, multi-modal transportation, and a diversity of employment opportunities. Indeed, their success in housing is notable as 23% of households in new towns are in social rental housing‚ about 5% higher than the UK average (p. 61). Some of the new towns are among the fastest growing and most desirable places in the UK, with well managed open space, updated commercial and civic areas, a mix of housing types including well-maintained social housing, and strong businesses. However, a few new towns are among the most deprived areas in the UK and suffer from the legacy of piecemeal sale of social housing, commercial areas, and even open space, making regeneration a huge logistical challenge. When the New Town Development Corporations were forced to sell commercial assets and then were wound down, some managed to set up mechanisms for comprehensive oversight of assets such as park systems but others did not. Some have maintained multi-modal transportation systems and others struggle with car-dominated environments. Often leaders in modernist design, in some new towns this involved important innovations and in others unsuccessful experimentation requiring demolition. * Ann Forsyth [email protected] 1
Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Planning, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
A. Forsyth
For experts on new towns this story is not new. However, new town experts are not the audience for this book. Rather the idea behind this volume is to explain to a broader audience that the perception that the new town program failed is an oversimplification. It had many successes and its failures were not, they argue, intrinsic to the model but rather form the basis for lessons about how to buil
Data Loading...
