AR Reading List 043: new towns

It can be seen as the architect’s greatest fantasy: to create an entirely new city, town or neighbourhood. Straight from the drawing board, each mark that the architect makes begins the formation of a new world. They assemble the roads, carve out the green space and lay the bricks – and in among it all, they create the world that they want to live in. The canvas is blank; scrubbed of all the wrongs of the contemporary town that they want to right. Against the harsh reality of the present, the hypothetical new town provides a comforting future.

This week’s Reading List looks at the point at which these utopian dreams become a reality. When an entire town is drawn from scratch, it matters whose hand is doing the drawing. From Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh to Niemeyer’s Brasília, we look at the implications of establishing new towns on fresh ground. Some over-planned and others under-achieved, new towns tell us just as much about the creator’s ideologies as they do their design preferences. As Tom Wilkinson writes in Typology: New towns, ‘no two utopias are created equal’.

Milton Keynes and the urbanism of innocence, AR September 1980, Peter Buchanan
‘The closest thing to being a centre now, and probably in the future, is the new shopping centre, a long shiny block which runs from one major grid road to another’

Building Brasilia, AR February 1959, Joaquim de Sousa-Leão
‘It is fairly featureless except for a distant rim of mountains in every direction. Its shape is a plateau with only minor undulations, rising slightly towards its centre’

Building utopia: 50 years of Auroville, AR May 2016, Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava
‘The Mother was introduced to the future-thinking artist-architect, Roger Anger, and the idea of an entirely new ‘international’ city was born – a utopia for material and spiritual experimentation to be called Auroville’

Buffer zones and golf estates: do we really need more Garden Cities?, Guy Trangoš, AR September 2014
‘A static, inward looking city is created, devoid of cultural complexity, diversity and tradition’

Chandigarh’s buildings and spaces are vividly brought to life by its residents, AR July 2011, Bärbel Högner
‘Some Indian academics see connectivity between Le Corbusier’s masterplan and the ancient architectural tradition’

Typology: New towns, AR June 2016, Tom Wilkinson
‘Utopia cannot be built, and is always a heuristic tool. Its failure is thus a necessity; its perfection would be horror’

Ghost towns, AR September 2012, Alastair Donald
‘How absurd, we say. Look, the roads are empty and unused. But in this debate, it is we who have lost our sense of the audacious’