Blog Post

Urban Planning, 1948

Interesting how it's at once forward-looking and backward.

Published December 17, 2009

(2009, December 17). Urban Planning, 1948. Retrieved from https://www.buildinggreen.com/news-article/urban-planning-1948

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Comments

December 17, 2009 - 9:20 am

The New Town was very much a UK thing back then that never really caught on in N America. Instead we went for suburban sprawl supported by roads and cars.

What intrigues me about this film is that, except for starting on a greenfield, how much the ideas resemble LEED ND.

December 17, 2009 - 9:54 am

Wow, amazing... I spent a couple weeks at several of the British new towns last year. The prewar quarters are good to great, but the postwar ones are absolutely horrific. Matter of fact, I was there on a planning job commissioned to figure out what to do with the 80,000 homes needed in the next several years north of London. New towns had been so thoroughly discredited by their postwar record that any mention of the possibility of building a new town today brought such visceral reactions that I feared physical violence.
But a substantial portion of the aims of this video are good. Not all, but many. So how can good intentions turn so bad? And what might we be doing today with the best of intentions that might result in some hideous future? We all need to regularly consider this question.