New town

Brasília, the capital city of Brazil, is a planned city

A new town, planned community, or planned city is a kind of city that is designed by architects and engineers before it is built. Most cities and towns just develop over the years, without a clear plan, and urban planning is used only for later expansion.

Planned communities are designed with separate districts of the city for parks, stores, homes, and offices. Many planned communities have a transportation system for commuters.

There are many examples of capital cities being planned throughout history like Baghdad, Iraq; Washington D.C., United States; New Delhi, India; Canberra, Australia; Brasília, Brazil; and Naypyidaw, Myanmar.

Pictures

The idea of planning a city is not new. This map shows that the ancient Greek city of Miletus (in Turkey today) had a grid plan, arranging its buildings in regular square blocks with streets in between.
Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate (758 CE–1258 CE) had a circular shape. Today, nothing survives of the "round city".
Canberra was designed by the architect Walter Burley Griffin in the early 20th century, to be a new capital for Australia.
Brasília was designed by architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer to be a new capital for Brazil. It was completed in 1960, and is shaped like an airplane or a bird.
In contrast, London was not planned. This map dates from around 1560.
It is easy to see the grid plan in Manhattan, in New York City. Central Park is the large rectangular green space. The plan was put into place in 1811.
When Barcelona, Spain expanded in the late 19th century, the architect Ildefons Cerdà created a plan. Older parts of the city do not follow the plan.
Nasr City, near Cairo, Egypt was built in the 1960s to a plan.
In contrast, older parts of Cairo were not planned. In the lower part of this picture, the smaller streets do not seem to follow any plan.

New Town Media

Partizánske/Baťovany in Slovakia – an example of a typical planned industrial city founded in 1938 together with a shoemaking factory in which practically all adult inhabitants of the city were employed
Abuja, in Nigeria, which was built mainly in the 1980s, was the fastest growing city in the world between 2000 and 2010, with an increase of 139.7%, and is still expanding rapidly
Brasília, the capital of Brazil, was built in less than 1,000 days in the 1960s
Plan of Fredericia (Denmark) in 1900 – the city was founded in 1650
Washington, D.C. was built as a planned city.
Satellite night imagery of Melbourne, showing the grid layout of the city.
Southern Castle Peak, Part of Tuen Mun New Town, developed from the 1970s onward
Boven de kaart, in spiegelbeeld: L'isle de la ville de Batavia;; Kopie in spiegelbeeld naar: The city of Batavia in the island of Java and capital of the Dutch factories & settlements in the East Indies / I. van Reyne. - London : R. Sayer, 1754*Datering situatie: ca. 1655;; Zuid boven;; Opticaprent in vogelvluchtperspectief
Bandung laid as a well-planned city, set as the new capital of the Dutch East Indies back in the 1920s.
A planned community in the Negev

Related pages

Other websites

The International New Town Institute, a research organization

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