New Towns

Historical Precedents

The modern American new town movement drew on a number of precedents. There exists, for instance, a long history of master-planned communities in the United States for the elite. Examples of these include Llewellyn Park, New Jersey (1857), Riverside, Illinois (1869), and Country Club District, Missouri (1906). Developers at these towns commissioned attractive community environments for those who could afford to pay a premium for common goods (parks, water systems, country clubs, etc.), custom house design, restrictive covenants, and attractive retail centers. Many of these planned districts today remain the most desirable neighborhoods in their metropolitan areas and command significant price premiums.

The more comprehensive notion of planning migrated from Great Britain to the United States in the early 20th century. Ebenezer Howard conceived of the garden city concept not as a refuge for the wealthy but as a wider solution to the problems of urban society. His garden city was a complete community, not just a bedroom community like elite American suburbs, and included residential, civic, agricultural, commercial, and industrial areas. Howard hoped, among other things, that the garden city would decentralize large urban centers, create a more just society through the municipal ownership of land, and bring people into closer contact with nature. The towns of Letchworth (1903) and Welwyn (1920), both in Britain, were created by Howard and his followers. These towns included municipal land ownership, green belts for agriculture and nature, commercial and civic town centers, light industrial parks, and a range of picturesque housing types.

The garden city's American version advanced in the crowded, sprawling New York region. Forest Hills Gardens, New York (1909), with its quaint blend of British and Germanic styles, formal parks, shopping square, and mixed housing types represented a first step. Designers Clarence Stein and Henry Wright joined with others to pioneer Radburn, New Jersey (1929), a more ambitious American garden city. Stein introduced pastoral suburban superblocks, [Page 509]which replaced large yards with landscaped common spaces, and culs-de-sac, which aimed to slow and tame the automobile. The designers made schools the focus of neighborhoods, developed a mixture of affordable housing types, offered grade separate walkways, planned a shopping area, and organized a community association. This project faltered during the Great Depression and became more suburb than garden city, yet it remained an influential and photogenic model. Stein was also a leader in the comprehensively planned greenbelt towns built by the Resettlement Administration during the 1930s including Greenbelt, Maryland (ca. 1937), that ran into formidable conservative federal resistance.

Postwar Developments

After World War II, many European governments seized on the new town concept as a way to erase the bitter memories of war, rebuild and decentralize older urban centers, and create model social democratic towns. Planners in European new towns largely discarded picturesque garden city precedents for modernist concepts that promoted streamlined styles and distilled the messiness of the industrial city into zones of housing, work, recreation, civic functions, and traffic. Leading examples of new towns of the time include Harlow (1947) in Great Britain and Tapiola (1951) in Finland. Tapiola, for instance, integrated international style residential designs with natural surroundings and clustered an elegant collection of contemporary buildings around an artificial lake in the town center. Many American developers and designers made pilgrimages to see these towns and borrowed freely from them.

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