Abstract
In Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town’s Movement, Rosemary Wakeman seeks to analyse the various routes through which governments, corporations, architects and planners sought to create a fresh incarnation of urbanism. As the author admits in the introductory text, ‘there is nothing new about new towns’ (p. 1). Even the oldest settlements were ‘new’ at some point. Thus, she proceeds from the standpoint of new town designation and planning as a highly figurative and territorial act. Each is approached as a physical representation of the power relations of its time and the dominant vision for the future thereof, hence the concern with utopia which runs throughout. From this standpoint, Wakeman investigates the length of the ‘golden age’ of the new towns movement: the period 1945–1975. The book seeks to add to our understanding by approaching a diverse array of new towns as spaces of ideas, hopes and dreams. Beyond ‘bricks and mortar’ the targets of enquiry are the less tangible practices, cultures and discourses which animated these ideal spaces in the minds of their makers. Much of the existing literature on new towns is contemporary to this ‘golden age’ itself. Key introductory texts for any scholar include Osborn and Whittick’s New Towns: Their Origins, Achievements and Progress (1977) and Munzer and Vogel’s New Towns: Building Cities from Scratch (1974). Unlike the predominantly Western stance of these volumes, Wakeman’s work is a truly international study which illustrates how the new towns movement expanded into many different local forms and practices, from an initially tightly bound set of ideas.
This diffusion was driven by discourses of modernity and ‘modernisation’ enshrined within the power of the state in a world shocked by depression and war, ready for change. As so enduringly well surmised by David Harvey (1989) whatever the solution to post-war reconstruction might be, it was not a return to the urban speculation and competition of the past. Thus, it was implicit that the state and its professionals must take charge of crafting through the new towns, not just what was assumed a better and more functional city form, but also a better and more functional society within.
After outlining these key themes, the first chapter provides a primer on the intellectual background for the golden age of new towns. In particular, Ebenezer Howard’s ‘garden cities’ issued a conceptual foundation to attack the urban sprawl of the industrial revolution and reset the urban landscape along more communitarian ideals. Chapter 2 illustrates how these ideals were re-energised in the immediate post-war period, with the attendant concept of ‘neighbourhood’ becoming central to the pioneering new towns of this era. In these settlements, discourses on family and community were translated physically into building and design practice alongside the developing idea of the social state and all its attendant norms of consumption, education and reproduction. Chapter 3 then breaks from the occidental stance on new towns. While the idea of ‘starting again’ with the urban was an exciting one in the West, it was even more so within the emerging independent nations, as a way of beginning afresh after decades of colonialism.
As the ‘golden age’ of new towns progressed so too did technology, creating unforeseen freedoms, but also risks. While the previous template of the garden city seemed exhausted, neither were the most dogmatic ideals of modernist architecture and planning viewed uncritically. Rather, Chapter 4 is centred on the rise of the technical and positivist approach to new town planning which sought an experimental middle ground. We are introduced to Constantinos Doxiadis’ ‘ekistics’, which in breaking from this mould, re-imagined the city as a set of flows of resources and information, as well as the work of Weber, Forrester and Fuller who attempted to rationalise urban life in equations and mathematical models. The final chapters examine in more detail the implementation and delivery of the revolutionary planning and architecture of new towns and the character of the encounters between these globalising intellectual visions and grounded social, economic and political realities.
In these conflicts and challenges lies the unique contribution of this book to the literature, deftly illustrating how the mobile ideals of a new urban ‘utopia’ were negotiated within the messy complexities and histories of the real places onto which they touched down. Key examples are thus the failure of ‘New Bombay’ to provide a city beyond India’s caste divisions and tradition of informal urbanism or the inadequacies of the US New Community projects in making state-led inroads into that country’s competitive real estate development system. A third undercutting theme of ‘dystopia’ therefore runs through the work. This also serves to highlight some of the darker experiences of new town life beneath the architectural or social blueprint, including the rudimentary camps for the Siberian new town builders or the slums for local oil workers surrounding the British company towns constructed in the decolonising Africa and Middle East.
The few limitations of this book are mainly related to the considerable challenge, as alluded to at the start of this review, of providing such a historically and geographically wide-ranging study of a complex subject. As a result, as a reviewer and native of one of the new towns featured (Cumbernauld, UK), it is felt that more local detail could have been added behind the theoretical content. Previous archive research into my home town has highlighted that, in between the ideals and delivery of such a project, lie a myriad of inter-professional and inter-personal politics, changes of direction, dreams grounded by reality and failures to make the numbers add up. Wakeman openly sets her focus on the conceptual over providing a detailed assessment of any one or group of new towns. It is perhaps more the reviewer’s wishful thinking that the book could be twice or three times as long as it is to accommodate this sort of examination alongside the excellent theoretical perspectives developed. Following from this, more attention would also have been welcome to how new towns have been adapted to a changing world, especially related to the widespread popular and academic criticisms of post-war planning and architecture. An expanding avenue in scholarship in recent years has thus focused on how the post-war urban landscape might be reimagined both from a physical and design perspective (Dunham-Jones and Williamson, 2009) and that of broader social policy and futures (Forsyth, 2014).
These limitations do little, however, to take away from the overall impact of Wakeman’s work. As in all good history I have read, Practicing Utopia shows the resonances between past and present clearly. The benefits of safe, sustainable and prosperous cities have always been manifest and so too are the practical difficulties of ensuring these ‘goods’ are available to all. This story of the ‘golden age’ of new towns thus provides context with which to approach today’s urban challenges. To move on from the undercurrents of dystopia beneath the visions of this time is not to abandon the possibility of realising a redefined urbanism or community, rather it is to positively learn from the failures and setbacks of previous attempts to achieve these goals. Thus, this book is a tremendously valuable one for the student or scholar with an interest in the urban and well worth a place in the library of any institution concerned with urban studies.