HISTORY OF URBAN PLANNINGUrban planning is a technical and political process concerned with the use of land and design of the urban environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas such as transportation and distribution networks. Urban Planning is also referred to as urban and regional, regional, town, city, rural planning or some combination in various areas worldwide.Urban planning guides and ensures the orderly development of settlements and satellite communities which commute into and out of urban areas or share resources with it. It concerns itself with research and analysis, strategic thinking, architecture, urban design, public consultation, policy recommendations, implementation and management.Urban Planners work with the cognate fields of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Civil Engineering, and Public Administration to achieve strategic, policy and sustainability goals. Early urban planners were often members of the these cognate fields. Today urban planning is a separate, independent professional discipline. The discipline is the broader category that includes many different sub-fields such as land-use planning, zoning, environmental planning, and transportation planning.The history of urban planning focuses on the people, places, concepts, and practices of planning of urban development over time.Pre-classicalIn the Neolithic period, agriculture and other techniques facilitated larger populations than the very small communities of the Paleolithic, which probably led to the stronger, more coercive governments emerging at that time. The pre-Classical and Classical periods saw a number of cities laid out according to fixed plans, though many tended to develop organically. Designed cities were characteristic of the Minoan, Mesopotamian, Indus Saraswati or Harappan, and Egyptian civilisations of the third millennium BC. The first recorded description of urban planning appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh: "Go up on to the wall of Uruk and walk around. Inspect the foundation platform and scrutinise the brickwork. Testify that its bricks are baked bricks, And that the Seven Counsellors must have laid its foundations. One square mile is city, one square mile is orchards, one square mile is claypits, as well as the open ground of Ishtar's temple.Three square miles and the open ground comprise Uruk. Look for the copper tablet-box, Undo its bronze lock, Open the door to its secret, Lift out the lapis lazuli tablet and read." Distinct characteristics of urban planning from remains of the cities of Harappa, Lothal, Dholavira and Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley Civilisation (in modern-day northwestern India and Pakistan) lead archeologists to interpret them as the earliest known examples of deliberately planned and managed cities. The streets of many of these early cities were paved and laid out at right angles in a grid pattern, with a hierarchy of streets from major boulevards to residential alleys. Archaeological evidence suggests that many Harrapan houses were laid out to protect from noise and to enhance residential privacy; many also had their own water wells, probably both for sanitary and for ritual purposes. These ancient cities were unique in that they had developed form of drainage systems much ahead of its time, seemingly tied to a well-developed ideal of urban sanitation.Many Central American civilisations also planned their cities, including sewage systems and running water. In Mexico, Tenochtitlan, built on an island in Lake Texcoco in the present-day Federal District in central Mexico, served as the capital of the Aztec empire. At its height, Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities in the world, with over 200,000 inhabitants.Classical and Medieval EuropeTraditionally, the Greek philosopher Hippodamus (5th century BC) is regarded as the first town planner and inventor of the orthogonal urban layout. Aristotle called him the father of city planning, and until well into the 20th century, he was indeed regarded as such. This is, however, only partly justified. The Hippodamian plan that was called after him, is an orthogonal urban layout with more or less square street blocks. Archaeological finds from ancient Egyptamong othersdemonstrate that Hippodamus cannot truly have been the inventor of this layout. Aristotle's critique and indeed ridicule of Hippodamus, which appears in Politics 2. 8, is perhaps the first known example of a criticism of urban planning.From about the late 8th century on, Greek city-states started to found colonies along the coasts of the Mediterranean, which were centred on newly created towns and cities with more or less regular orthogonal plans. Gradually, the new layouts became more regular. After the city of Miletus was destroyed by the Persians in 494 BC, it was rebuilt in a regular form that, according to tradition, was determined by the ideas of Hippodamus of Miletus. Regular orthogonal plans particularly appear to have been laid out for new colonial cities and cities that were rebuilt in a short period of time after destruction.Following in the tradition of Hippodamus about a century later, Alexander commissioned the architect Dinocrates to lay out his new city of Alexandria, the grandest example of idealised urban planning of the ancient Hellenistic world, where the city's regularity was facilitated by its level site near a mouth of the Nile.The ancient Romans also employed regular orthogonal structures on which they molded their colonies. They probably were inspired by Greek and Hellenic examples, as well as by regularly planned cities that were built by the Etruscans in Italy.The Romans used a consolidated scheme for city planning, developed for military defence and civil convenience. The basic plan consisted of a central forum with city services, surrounded by a compact, rectilinear grid of streets, and wrapped in a wall for defence. To reduce travel times, two diagonal streets crossed the square grid, passing through the central square. A river usually flowed through the city, providing water, transport, and sewage disposal. Hundreds of towns and cities were built by the Romans throughout their empire. Many European towns, such as Turin, preserve the remains of these schemes, which show the very logical way the Romans designed their cities. They would lay out the streets at right angles, in the form of a square grid. All roads were equal in width and length, except for two, which were slightly wider than the others. One of these ran eastwest, the other, northsouth, and intersected in the middle to form the centre of the grid. All roads were made of carefully fitted flag stones and filled in with smaller, hard-packed rocks and pebbles. Bridges were constructed where needed. Each square marked by four roads was called an insula, the Roman equivalent of a modern city block.Each insula was 80 yards (73 m) square, with the land within it divided. As the city developed, each insula would eventually be filled with buildings of various shapes and sizes and crisscrossed with back roads and alleys. Most insulae were given to the first settlers of a Roman city, but each person had to pay to construct his own house.The city was surrounded by a wall to protect it from invaders and to mark the city limits. Areas outside city limits were left open as farmland. At the end of each main road was a large gateway with watchtowers. A portcullis covered the opening when the city was under siege, and additional watchtowers were constructed along the city walls. An aqueduct was built outside the city walls.The development of Greek and Roman urbanisation is relatively well-known, as there are relatively many written sources, and there has been much attention to the subject since the Romans and Greeks are generally regarded as the main ancestors of modern Western culture. It should not be forgotten, though, that there were also other cultures with more or less urban settlements in Europe, primarily of Celtic origin. Among these, there are also cases that appear to have been newly planned, such as the Lusatian town of Biskupin in Poland.After the gradual disintegration and fall of the West-Roman empire in the 5th century and the devastation by the invasions of Huns, Germanic peoples, Byzantines, Moors, Magyars, and Normans in the next five centuries, little remained of urban culture in western and central Europe. In the 10th and 11th centuries, though, there appears to have been a general improvement in the political stability and economy. This made it possible for trade and craft to grow and for the monetary economy and urban culture to revive. Initially, urban culture recovered particularly in existing settlements, often in remnants of Roman towns and cities, but later on, ever more towns were created anew. Meanwhile, the population of western Europe increased rapidly and the utilised agricultural area grew with it. The agricultural areas of existing villages were extended and new villages and towns were created in uncultivated areas as cores for new reclamations.Urban development in the early Middle Ages, characteristically focused on a fortress, a fortified abbey, or a (sometimes abandoned) Roman nucleus, occurred "like the annular rings of a tree", whether in an extended village or the centre of a larger city. Since the new centre was often on high, defensible ground, the city plan took on an organic character, following the irregularities of elevation contours like the shapes that result from agricultural terracing.In the 9th to 14th centuries, many hundreds of new towns were built in Europe, and many others were enlarged with newly planned extensions. These new towns and town extensions have played a very important role in the shaping of Europes geographical structures as they in modern times. New towns were founded in different parts of Europe from about the 9th century on, but most of them were realised from the 12th to 14th centuries, with a peak-period at the end of the 13th. All kinds of landlords, from the highest to the lowest rank, tried to found new towns on their estates, in order to gain economical, political or military power. The settlers of the new towns generally were attracted by fiscal, economic, and juridical advantages granted by the founding lord, or were forced to move from elsewhere from his estates. Most of the new towns were to remain rather small (as for instance the bastides of southwestern France), but some of them became important cities, such as Cardiff, Leeds, s-Hertogenbosch, Montauban, Bilbao, Malm, Lbeck, Munich, Berlin, Bern, Klagenfurt, Alessandria, Warsaw and Sarajevo.From the evidence of the preserved towns, it appears that the formal structure of many of these towns was willfully planned. The newly founded towns often show a marked regularity in their plan form, in the sense that the streets are often straight and laid out at right angles to one another, and that the house lots are rectangular, and originally largely of the same size. One very clear and relatively extreme example is Elburg in the Netherlands, dating from the end of the 14th century. Looking at town plans such as the one of Elburg, it clearly appears that it is impossible to maintain that the straight street and the symmetrical, orthogonal town plan were new inventions from the Renaissance,' and, therefore, typical of modern times.'The deep depression around the middle of the 14th century marked the end of the period of great urban expansion. Only in the parts of Europe where the process of urbanisation had started relatively late, as in eastern Europe, was it still to go on for one or two more centuries. It would not be until the Industrial Revolution that the same level of expansion of urban population would be reached again, although the number of newly created settlements would remain much lower than in the 12th and 13th centuries.Renaissance EuropeFlorence was an early model of the new urban planning, which took on a star-shaped layout adapted from the new star fort, designed to resist cannon fire. This model was widely imitated, reflecting the enormous cultural power of Florence in this age; "the Renaissance was hypnotised by one city type which for a century and a half from Filarete to Scamozzi was impressed upon utopian schemes: this is the star-shaped city". Radial streets extend outward from a defined centre of military, communal or spiritual power.Only in ideal cities did a centrally planned structure stand at the heart, as in Raphael's Sposalizio (Illustration) of 1504. As built, the unique example of a rationally planned quattrocento new city centre, that of Vigevano (149395), resembles a closed space instead, surrounded by arcading.Filarete's ideal city, building on Leon Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria, was named "Sforzinda" in compliment to his patron; its twelve-pointed shape, circumscribable by a "perfect" Pythagorean figure, the circle, took no heed of its undulating terrain in Filarete's manuscript. This process occurred in cities, but ordinarily not in the industrial suburbs characteristic of this era, which remained disorderly and characterised by crowding and organic growth.Following the 1695 bombardment of Brussels by the French troops of King Louis XIV, in which a large part of the city centre was destroyed, Governor Max Emanuel proposed using the reconstruction to completely change the layout and architectural style of the city. His plan was to transform the medieval city into a city of the new baroque style, modeled on Turin, with a logical street layout, with straight avenues offering long, uninterrupted views flanked by buildings of a uniform size. This plan was opposed by residents and municipal authorities, who wanted a rapid reconstruction, did not have the resources for grandiose proposals, and resented what they considered the imposition of a new, foreign, architectural style. In the actual reconstruction, the general layout of the city was conserved, but it was not identical to that before the cataclysm. Despite the necessity of rapid reconstruction and the lack of financial means, authorities did take several measures to improve traffic flow, sanitation, and the aesthetics of the city. Many streets were made as wide as possible to improve traffic flow.Enlightenment EuropeDuring this period, rulers often embarked on ambitious attempts at redesigning their capital cities as a showpiece for the grandeur of the nation. Disasters were often a major catalyst for planned reconstruction. An exception to this was in London after the Great Fire of 1666 when, despite many radical rebuilding schemes from architects such as John Evelyn and Christopher Wren, no large-scale redesigning was achieved due the complexities of rival ownership claims. However, improvements were made in hygiene and fire safety with wider streets, stone construction and access to the river.In contrast, after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, King Joseph I of Portugal and his ministers immediately launched efforts to rebuild the city. The architect Manuel da Maia boldly proposed razing entire sections of the city and "laying out new streets without restraint". This last option was chosen by the king and his minister. Keen to have a new and perfectly ordered city, the king commissioned the construction of big squares, rectilinear, large avenues and widened streets the new mottos of Lisbon. The Pombaline buildings were among the earliest seismically protected constructions in Europe.An even more ambitious reconstruction was carried out in Paris. In 1852, Baron Georges-Eugne Haussmann was commissioned to remodel the Medieval street plan of the city by demolishing swathes of the old quarters and laying out wide boulevards, extending outwards beyond the old city limits. Haussmann's project encompassed all aspects of urban planning, both in the centre of Paris and in the surrounding districts, with regulations imposed on building faades, public parks, sewers and water works, city facilities, and public monuments. Beyond aesthetic and sanitary considerations, the wide thoroughfares facilitated troop movement and policing.A concurrent plan to extend Barcelona was based on a scientific analysis of the city and its modern requirements. It was drawn up by the Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerd to fill the space beyond the city walls after they were demolished from 1854. He is credited with inventing the term urbanisation and his approach was codified in his General Theory of Urbanisation (1867). Cerd's Eixample (Catalan for 'extension') consisted of 550 regular blocks with chamfered corners to facilitate the movement of trams, crossed by three wider avenues. His objectives were to improve the health of the inhabitants, towards which the blocks were built around central gardens and orientated NW-SE to maximise the sunlight they received, and assist social integration.Modern urban planningPlanning and architecture went through a paradigm shift at the turn of the 20th century. The industrialised cities of the 19th century had grown at a tremendous rate, with the pace and style of building largely dictated by private business concerns. The evils of urban life for the working poor were becoming increasingly evident as a matter for public concern. The laissez-faire style of government management of the economy, in fashion for most of the Victorian era, was starting to give way to a New Liberalism that championed intervention on the part of the poor and disadvantaged. Around 1900, theorists began developing urban planning models to mitigate the consequences of the industrial age, by providing citizens, especially factory workers, with healthier environments.Garden city movementThe first major urban planning theorist was Sir Ebenezer Howard, who initiated the garden city movement in 1898. This was inspired by earlier planned communities built by industrial philanthropists in the countryside, such as Cadburys' Bournville, Lever's Port Sunlight and George Pullman's eponymous Pullman in Chicago. All these settlements decentralised the working environment from the centre of the cities, and provided a healthy living space for the factory workers. Howard generalised this achievement into a planned movement for the country as a whole. He was also influenced by the work of economist Alfred Marshall who argued in 1884 that industry needed a supply of labour that could in theory be supplied anywhere, and that companies have an incentive to improve workers living standards as the company bears much of the cost inflicted by the unhealthy urban conditions in the big cities.Howard's ideas, although utopian, were also highly practical and were adopted around the world in the ensuing decades. His garden cities were intended to be planned, self-contained communities surrounded by parks, containing proportionate and separate areas of residences, industry, and agriculture. Inspired by the Utopian novel Looking Backward and Henry George's work Progress and Poverty, Howard published his book Garden Cities of To-morrow in 1898, commonly regarded as the most important book in the history of urban planning. His idealised garden city would house 32,000 people on a site of 6,000 acres (2,428 ha), planned on a concentric pattern with open spaces, public parks and six radial boulevards, 120 ft (37 m) wide, extending from the centre. The garden city would be self-sufficient and when it reached full population, another garden city would be developed nearby. Howard envisaged a cluster of several garden cities as satellites of a central city of 50,000 people, linked by road and rail.He founded First Garden City, Ltd. in 1899 to create the first garden city at Letchworth, Hertfordshire. Donors to the project collected interest on their investment if the garden city generated profits through rents or, as Fishman calls the process, philanthropic land speculation. Howard tried to include working class cooperative organisations, which included over two million members, but could not win their financial support. In 1904, Raymond Unwin, a noted architect and town planner, along with his partner Barry Parker, won the competition run by the First Garden City, Limited to plan Letchworth, an area 34 miles outside London. Unwin and Parker planned the town in the centre of the Letchworth estate with Howards large agricultural greenbelt surrounding the town, and they shared Howards notion that the working class deserved better and more affordable housing. However, the architects ignored Howards symmetric design, instead replacing it with a more organic design.Welwyn Garden City, also in Hertfordshire was also built on Howard's principles. His successor as chairman of the Garden City Association was Sir Frederic Osborn, who extended the movement to regional planning.The principles of the garden city were soon applied to the planning of city suburbs. The first such project was the Hampstead Garden Suburb founded by Henrietta Barnett and planned by Parker and Unwin. The scheme's utopian ideals were that it should be open to all classes of people with free access to woods and gardens and that the housing should be of low density with wide, tree-lined roads.In North America, the Garden City movement was also popular, and evolved into the "Neighbourhood Unit" form of development. In the early 1900s, as cars were introduced to city streets for the first time, residents became increasingly concerned with the number of pedestrians being injured by car traffic. The response, seen first in Radburn, New Jersey, was the Neighbourhood Unit-style development, which oriented houses toward a common public path instead of the street. The neighbourhood is distinctively organised around a school, with the intention of providing children a safe way to walk to school.Urban planning professionUrban planning became professionalised at this period, with input from utopian visionaries as well as from the practical minded infrastructure engineers and local councillors combining to produce new design templates for political consideration. The Town and Country Planning Association was founded in 1899 and the first academic course on urban planning was offered by the University of Liverpool in 1909.The first official consideration of these new trends was embodied in the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 that compelled local authorities to introduce coherent systems of town planning across the country using the new principles of the 'garden city', and to ensure that all housing construction conformed to specific building standards.Following this Act, surveyors, civil engineers, architects, lawyers and others began working together within local government in the UK to draw up schemes for the development of land and the idea of town planning as a new and distinctive area of expertise began to be formed. In 1910, Thomas Adams was appointed as the first Town Planning Inspector at the Local Government Board, and began meeting with practitioners. The Town Planning Institute was established in 1914 with a mandate to advance the study of town-planning and civic design. The first university course in America was established at Harvard University in 1924.The Tudor Walters Committee that recommended the building of housing estates after World War One incorporated the ideas of Howard's disciple Raymond Unwin, who demonstrated that homes could be built rapidly and economically whilst maintaining satisfactory standards for gardens, family privacy and internal spaces. Unwin diverged from Howard by proposing that the new developments should be peripheral 'satellites' rather than fully-fledged garden cities.ModernismIn the 1920s, the ideas of modernism began to surface in urban planning. The influential modernist architect Le Corbusier presented his scheme for a "Contemporary City" for three million inhabitants (Ville Contemporaine) in 1922. The centrepiece of this plan was the group of sixty-story cruciform skyscrapers, steel-framed office buildings encased in huge curtain walls of glass. These skyscrapers were set within large, rectangular, park-like green spaces. At the centre was a huge transportation hub that on different levels included depots for buses and trains, as well as highway intersections, and at the top, an airport. Le Corbusier had the fanciful notion that commercial airliners would land between the huge skyscrapers. He segregated pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways and glorified the automobile as a means of transportation. As one moved out from the central skyscrapers, smaller low-story, zig-zag apartment blocks (set far back from the street amid green space) housed the inhabitants. Le Corbusier hoped that politically minded industrialists in France would lead the way with their efficient Taylorist and Fordist strategies adopted from American industrial models to re-organise society.In 1925, he exhibited his "Plan Voisin", in which he proposed to bulldoze most of central Paris north of the Seine and replace it with his sixty-story cruciform towers from the Contemporary City, placed within an orthogonal street grid and park-like green space. In the 1930s, Le Corbusier expanded and reformulated his ideas on urbanism, eventually publishing them in La Ville radieuse (The Radiant City) in 1935. Perhaps the most significant difference between the Contemporary City and the Radiant City is that the latter abandoned the class-based stratification of the former; housing was now assigned according to family size, not economic position. Le Corbusier's theories were sporadically adopted by the builders of public housing in Europe and the United States.Many of his disciples became notable in their own right, including painter-architect Nadir Afonso, who absorbed Le Corbusier's ideas into his own aesthetics theory. Lcio Costa's city plan of Braslia and the industrial city of Zln planned by Frantiek Lydie Gahura in the Czech Republic are notable plans based on his ideas, while the architect himself produced the plan for Chandigarh in India. Le Corbusier's thinking also had been profoundly effected by the philosophy of Futurism and Constructivism in Russia at the turn of the 20th century.Another important theorist was Sir Patrick Geddes who understood the importance of taking the regional environment into account and the relationship between social issues and town planning, and foresaw the emergence of huge urban conurbations. In 1927, he was commissioned to plan the city of Tel Aviv, then in the British mandate for Palestine. It consisted of about 40 blocks, sized around 150 metres squared. The block contained an inner small public garden, disposed into a windmill configuration of inner access roads, making it awkward for car traffic. The big blocks form a gently undulating street pattern, north-south commercial, east-west arranged to catch the sea breeze. This was a simple and efficient manner to modernise the historical fixed grid patterns. A series of shaded boulevards short cuts the system, with some public squares, accessing the sea front. The plan of the new town became a success.New TownsEbenezer Howard's urban planning concepts were only adopted on a large scale after World War II. The damage brought on by the war provoked significant public interest in what post-war Britain would be like, which was encouraged by the government, who facilitated talk about a Better Britain to boost morale. Post-war rebuilding initiatives saw new plans drafted for London, which, for the first time, addressed the issue of de-centralisation. Firstly, the County of London Plan 1943 recognised that displacement of population and employment was necessary if the city was to be rebuilt at a desirable density. Moreover, the Greater London Plan of 1944 went further by suggesting that over one million people would need to be displaced into a mixture of satellite suburbs, existing rural towns, and new towns.The New Towns Act 1946 resulted many New Towns being constructed in Britain over the following decades.New towns were built in the United States from the 1960s examples include Reston, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland; Jonathan, Minnesota and Riverside Plaza. This construction effort was combined with extensive federal government grants for slum clearance, improved and increased housing and road construction and comprehensive urban renewal projects. Other European countries such as France, Germany, Italy and Sweden also had some successes with new towns, especially as part of post-war reconstruction efforts.Urban CrisisBy the late 1960s and early 1970s, many planners felt that modernism's clean lines and lack of human scale sapped vitality from the community, blaming them for high crime rates and social problems.Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries, such as Britain and France. Since then many have been demolished and replaced by other housing types. Rather than attempting to eliminate all disorder, planning now concentrates on individualism and diversity in society and the economy; this is the post-modernist era.Minimally planned cities still exist. Houston is a large city (with a metropolitan population of 5.5 million) in a developed country without a comprehensive zoning ordinance. Houston does, however, restrict development densities and mandate parking, even though specific land uses are not regulated. Also, private-sector developers in Houston use subdivision covenants and deed restrictions to effect land-use restrictions resembling zoning laws. Houston voters have rejected comprehensive zoning ordinances three times since 1948.New UrbanismVarious current movements in urban design seek to create sustainable urban environments with long-lasting structures, buildings and a great liveability for its inhabitants. The most clearly defined form of walkable urbanism is known as the Charter of New Urbanism. It is an approach for successfully reducing environmental impacts by altering the built environment to create and preserve smart cities that support sustainable transport. Residents in compact urban neighbourhoods drive fewer miles and have significantly lower environmental impacts across a range of measures compared with those living in sprawling suburbs. The concept of Circular flow land use management has also been introduced in Europe to promote sustainable land use patterns that strive for compact cities and a reduction of greenfield land taken by urban sprawl.In sustainable construction, the recent movement of New Classical Architecture promotes a sustainable approach towards urban construction that appreciates and develops smart growth, walkability, architectural tradition, and classical design. This is in contrast to modernist and short-lived globally uniform architecture, as well as opposing solitary housing estates and suburban sprawl. Both trends started in the 1980s.Critics of New Urbanism have argued that its environmental aspect is too focused on transport and excessive individual mobility. The real problem with the unsustainable nature of modern cities is not just about cars and too much driving - it is about the entire urban metabolism of the city (of which auto-mobility is less than half of the overall ecological footprint and accounts for about half of the GHG emissions/carbon footprint). They have also argued that land-use planning can do little to achieve sustainability without regulating the design and associated technology of the actual development within a zoned area. Distances and density are relatively unimportant; it is the total metabolism of the development that determines the environmental impact. Also, the emphasis needs to shift from sustainability to resilience, and the spatial scope from the city to the whole urban region. A further criticism is that the New Urbanist project of compacting urban form is a difficult and slow process. In the new global situation, with the horizontal, low-density growth irreversibly dominant, and climate change already happening, it would be wiser to focus efforts on the resilience of whole city-regions, retrofitting the existing sprawl for sustainability and self-sufficiency, and investing heavily in 'green infrastructure'.Sustainable development and sustainabilitySustainable development and sustainability influence today's urban planners. Some planners argue that modern lifestyles use too many natural resources, polluting or destroying ecosystems, increasing social inequality, creating urban heat islands, and causing climate change. Many urban planners, therefore, advocate sustainable cities.However, sustainable development is a recent, controversial concept. Wheeler, in his 2004 book, defines sustainable urban development as "development that improves the long-term social and ecological health of cities and towns." He sketches a 'sustainable' city's features: compact, efficient land use; less automobile use, yet better access; efficient resource use; less pollution and waste; the restoration of natural systems; good housing and living environments; a healthy social ecology; a sustainable economy; community participation and involvement; and preservation of local culture and wisdom. Urban planners are now promoting a sustainable city model, which consists of cities that designed with consideration of environmental impacts, such as minimising the uses of energy, water, and the outputs of waste and pollution.Because of political and governance structures in most jurisdictions, sustainable planning measures must be widely supported before they can affect institutions and regions. Actual implementation is often a complex compromise.Nature in cities Often an integral party of sustainable cities is the Incorporation of nature within a city.Car free sustainability in city planning can include large pedestrian zones or be a totally Car free.Collaborative Strategic Goal Oriented Programming (CoSGOP) is a collaborative and communicative way of strategic programming, decision-making, implementation, and monitoring oriented towards defined and specific goals. It is based on sound analysis of available information, emphasises stakeholder participation, works to create awareness among actors, and is oriented towards managing development processes. It was adopted as a theoretical framework for analysing redevelopment processes in large urban distressed areas in European cities.Background of CoSGOP'CoSGOP is derived from goal-oriented planning (Gesellschaft fr Technische Zusammenarbeit GTZ 1988), which was oriented towards the elaboration and implementation of projects based on a logical framework, which was useful for embedding a specific project in a wider development frame and defining its major elements. This approach had weaknesses: its logical rules were strictly applied and the expert language did not encourage participation. CoSGOP introduced a new approach characterised by communication with and active involvement of stakeholders and those to be affected by the program; strategic planning based on the identification of strengths and weakness, opportunities and threats, as well as on scenario-building and visioning; the definition of goals as the basis for action; and long-term, flexible programming of interventions by stakeholders.Elements of CoSGOPCoSGOP is not a planning method but a process model. It provides a framework for communication and joint decision-making, in a structured process characterised by feedback loops. It also facilitates stakeholder learning. The essential elements of CoSGOP are analysis of stakeholders (identifying stakeholders perceptions of problems, interests, and expectations); analysis of problems and potentials (including objective problems and problems and potentials perceived by stakeholders); development of goals, improvement priorities, and alternatives (requiring intensive communication and active stakeholder participation); specification of an improvement program and its main activities (based on priorities defined with the stakeholders); assessment of possible impacts of the improvement program; definition and detailed specification of key projects and their implementation; continuous monitoring of improvement activities, feedback, and adjustment of the programme (including technical and economic information and perceptions of stakeholders).ApplicationCoSGOP has been applied in European cross-border policy programming, as well in local and regional development programming. In 2004, the CoSGOP model was applied in the LUDA Project, starting with an analysis of the European experience of urban regeneration projects.Collaborative planning in the United StatesCollaborative planning arose in the US in response to the inadequacy of traditional public participation techniques to provide real opportunities for the public to make decisions affecting their communities. Collaborative planning is a method designed to empower stakeholders by elevating them to the level of decision-makers through direct engagement and dialogue between stakeholders and public agencies, to solicit ideas, active involvement, and participation in the community planning process. Active public involvement can help planners achieve better outcomes by making them aware of the publics needs and preferences and by using local knowledge to inform projects. When properly administered, collaboration can result in more meaningful participation and better, more creative outcomes to persistent problems than can traditional participation methods. It enables planners to make decisions that reflect community needs and values, it fosters faith in the wisdom and utility of the resulting project, and the community is given a personal stake in its success.Experiences in Portland and Seattle have demonstrated that successful collaborative planning depends on a number of interrelated factors: the process must be truly inclusive, with all stakeholders and affected groups invited to the table; the community must have final decision-making authority; full government commitment (of both financial and intellectual resources) must be manifest; participants should be given clear objectives by planning staff, who facilitate the process by providing guidance, consultancy, expert opinions, and research; and facilitators should be trained in conflict resolution and community organisation.Planned Cities in EuropeA planned community, or planned city, is any community that was carefully planned from its inception and is typically constructed in a previously undeveloped area. This contrasts with settlements that evolve in a more ad hoc fashion. Land use conflicts are less frequent in planned communities since they are planned carefully. The term new town refers to planned communities of the new towns movement in particular, mainly in the United Kingdom. It was also common in the European colonization of the Americas to build according to a plan either on fresh ground or on the ruins of earlier Amerindian cities.Planned capital citiesSeveral of the world's capital cities are planned cities, including Canberra in Australia, Braslia in Brazil, Belmopan in Belize, New Delhi in India, Valletta in Malta, Abuja in Nigeria, Astana in Kazakhstan, Naypyidaw in Burma, Islamabad in Pakistan and Washington, D.C., in the United States. In Egypt, a new capital city east of Cairo has been proposed. The federal administrative centre of Malaysia, Putrajaya, is also a planned city.Abu Dhabi (UAE) and some of the recently built cities in the Persian Gulf region are also planned cities, built on the money from the oil boom. Prior to the boom, these were just villages or towns.EuropeHistoryNew settlements were planned in Europe at least since Greek antiquity. The Greeks build new colonial cities around the Mediterranean. The ancient Romans also founded many new colonial towns through their empire. There are, however, also traces of planned settlements of non-Roman origin in pre-historic northern Europe. Most planned settlements of medieval Europe were created in the period of about the 12th to 14th centuries. All kinds of landlords, from the highest to the lowest rank, tried to found new villages and towns on their estates, in order to gain economical, political or military power. The settlers generally were attracted by fiscal, economical and juridical advantages granted by the founding lord, or were forced to move from elsewhere from his estates. Most of the new towns were to remain rather small (as for instance the bastides of southwestern France, but some of them became important cities, such as Cardiff, Leeds, s-Hertogenbosch, Montauban, Bilbao, Malm, Lbeck, Munich, Berlin, Bern, Klagenfurt, Alessandria, Warsaw and Sarajevo.Roman EmpireThe Romans built a large number of towns throughout their empire, often as colonies for the settlement of citizens or veterans. These were generally characterised by a grid of streets and a planned water-supply; and many modern European towns of originally Roman foundation still retain part of the original street-grid. The most impressive Roman planned town was the city of Constantinople from around the 4th century. Roman Emperor Constantine the Great chose the site for the new metropolis and began construction. His plans quickly fell into place. The modern city (now known as Istanbul) has changed much since then, but it must be remembered that the city did not develop due to simple human migrational patterns nor pure military advantage. Constantine wanted a city to mark his magnificence and Constantinople fulfilled the desire.BelgiumLouvain-la-Neuve, built for the Universit Catholique de Louvain.Bosnia and HerzegovinaSlobomir is a new town in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its name means: "the city of freedom and peace". It is located on the Drina river near Bijeljina. It was founded by Slobodan Pavlovi, a Bosnian philanthropist. It aims to be one of the major cities of post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. In fact, the city will be located in two countries, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, although majority of it will be in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The city is named after its founder, Slobodan Pavlovi, and his wife, Mira.Andrigrad is town under construction by the famous Serbian director Emir Kusturica, and will be located in Viegrad, Republika Srpska.BulgariaThe cities of Stara Zagora and Kazanlak, in central Bulgaria, were rebuilt as planned cities after they were burnt to the ground in the 1877-1878 Russia-Turkey War. Also the city of Dimitrovgrad in south Bulgaria, that was planned as a key industrial and infrastructure center.Croatiaervar-Porat is a resort town in western Croatia, located on the east coast of the Adriatic Sea on the ervar lagoon. It was built as planned town in the 1970s, although the area was inhabited in Roman times. During the War of Independence it was used as a camp for refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Vukovar. It was planned to house 6500 people.The capital of Zagreb underwent major expansion during the 60's. By that time, the city's official boundary was the river Sava, since nothing was built over it. After a flood in the 60's, many residents were moved and some other districts were created for the residents, such as Dubrava, which was the interconnection between the Zagreb's old part and Sesvete. During the 60's and 70's, a planned part of Zagreb, Novi Zagreb (New Zagreb), was constructed, which lied on the other, uninhabited part of the river Sava, and is now one of major districts consisting of purely residential buildings and blocks. It is still under expansion and some new landmarks were built in it, the most famous one is the recent one, Arena Zagreb, built in 2008.Czechoslovakia and Czech RepublicPoruba and Havov were established in the 1950s as new satellite residential towns for workers of coal-mining, steel-mill and other heavy-industry complex in the Ostrava region.Prague was extended by large housing estates - "new towns" in the 1970s and 1980s: Severn Msto (Northern Town), Jin Msto (Southern Town), Jihozpadn Msto (South-Western Town) were the largest, with population around 100.000 each. Their remote position to the city centre was compensated for by underground lines constructed usually a decade after the completion of the housing projects.DenmarkFredericia was designed as a combination of town and military fortress following the devastation caused by the Thirty Years' War. A more recent example is restad, planned and built to strengthen development in the Copenhagen/Malm region. The suburb Albertslund was also built from scratch in the 1970s, merging the two villages Vridslselille and Herstedvester.FinlandThe city of Helsinki, previously a town of 5,000 inhabitants, was made the capital of the new Grand Duchy of Finland in 1812 by decree of Alexander I, Emperor of Russia. The city center was rebuilt with the lead of the German architect Carl Ludvig Engel.However, the last city in Finland that was ordered to be built on a previously completely uninhabited land was Raahe, founded by governor general Per Brahe the Younger in 1649.Finland also has various "ekokyl" communities or "ecological villages". For example, Tapiola is a post-war garden city on the edge of Espoo.The city of Vaasa was rebuilt about seven kilometers northwest of its original location in 1862, after a fire which destroyed the city in 1852. The new town was planned by Carl Axel Setterberg. The disastrous consequences of the fire were considered as the design included five broad avenues which divided the town into sections and each block was divided by alleys.Hamina is an old Finnish Eastern trade capital, founded during the Swedish reign. The star-shaped fortress and the circular town plan are based on an Italian Renaissance fortress concept from the 16th century. Fortress towns like this are quite rare, another example is Palmanova in Italy.FranceMany new cities, called bastides, were founded from the 12th to 14th centuries in southwestern France, where the Hundred Years War took place, in order to replace destroyed cities and organize defence and growth. Among those, Monpazier, Beaumont, and Villeral are good examples.In 1517, the construction of Le Havre was ordered by Francis I of France as a new port. It was completely destroyed during the Second World War and was entirely rebuilt in a modernist style, during the Trente Glorieuses, the thirty-year period from 1945-1975.Cardinal Richelieu founded the small Baroque town of Richelieu, which remains largely unchanged.A program of new towns (French ville nouvelle) was developed in the mid-1960s to try to control the expansion of cities. Nine villes nouvelles were created. Near Paris: Cergy-Pontoise, Marne-la-Valle, Snart (former Melun-Snart), vry, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Near Lille: Villeneuve d'Ascq (Former Lille-Est) Near Lyon: L'Isle-d'Abeau Near Marseille: Rives de l'Etang de Berre Near Rouen: Val-de-Reuil Near Grenoble: L'Isle-d'AbeauLa Dfense, in the greater Paris area, could also be considered a planned town, though it was not built all at once but in successive stages beginning in the 1950s.GermanyPlanned cities in Germany are: Bayreuth: an example of a medieval new city Berlin - Friedrichstadt Eisenhttenstadt: the "first socialist town" in Germany Freudenstadt: the roads follow the layout of the Nine Men's Morris game Halle-Neustadt: a "Stadtteil" or borough in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt Karlsruhe: the roads follow the layout of a hand-held fan with the castle being at the juncture Ludwigsburg: planned new capital for the duke of Wrttemberg Mannheim Quadratestadt: squares named like ranks and files on a chessboard Munich Maxvorstadt: the first planned city expansion of Munich was realized from 1805 to 1810 according to a raster Neustrelitz: founded in 1733 with streets spreading from an octagonal market place Putbus: built around a circular centre with radially aligned streets Wolfsburg: founded in 1938 to host the factories for the newly built VolkswagenWelthauptstadt Germania was the projected renewal of Berlin as a planned city, although only a small portion was constructed between 1937 and 1943.GreecePlanned cities in Greece are: Nea Alikarnassos: founded in 1925 to house Greek refugees. Orestiada: founded in 1922 to house Greek refugees. Paralia Distomou: planned and built to house workers of Aluminium of Greece. Sparta: planned and built in 1834 after a decree issued by Otto of GreeceHungaryAll Hungarian planned cities were built in the second half of the 20th century when a program of rapid industrialization was implemented by the communist government. The Akadmiajtelep area of Budapest was designed in a unique geometrical fashion. Dunajvros, built next to the existing village Dunapentele to provide housing for workers of a large steel factory complex. Once named after Stalin, the city maintains its importance in heavy industry even after the recession following the end of Communist era. Tiszajvros, built next to the existing village Tiszaszederkny and was named after Lenin for decades. A significant chemical factory was built simultaneously. Kazincbarcika, created from the villages Sajkazinc, Barcika and Berente (the latter has become independent since then) in a mining area. The city and its population grew fast after the founding of a factory. Tatabnya, created from four already existing villages was developed into a mining town and industrial centre and shortly after its elevation to town status became the county seat of its county, a status it still maintains despite the presence of historically more significant towns in the area. Beloiannisz (although not a town, only a village) was planned and built in the 1950s to provide home for Greek refugees of the Civil War.IrelandIn the Republic of Ireland, as in the United Kingdom, the term "new town" is often used to refer to planned towns built after World War II which were discussed as early as 1941. The term "new town" in Ireland was also used for some earlier developments, notably during the Georgian era. Part of Limerick city was built in a planned fashion as "Newtown Pery".In 1961 the first new town of Shannon was commenced and a target of 6,000 inhabitants was set. This has since been exceeded. Shannon is of some regional importance today as an economic centre (with the Shannon Free Zone and Shannon International Airport), but until recently failed to expand in population as anticipated. Since the late 1990s, and particularly in the early 2000s, the population has been expanding at a much faster rate, with town rejuvenation, new retail and entertainment facilities and many new housing developments.It was not until 1967 that the Wright Report planned four towns in County Dublin. These were Blanchardstown, Clondalkin, Lucan and Tallaght but in actuality this was reduced to Blanchardstown, Lucan-Clondalkin and Tallaght. Each of these towns has approximately 50,000 inhabitants today.The most recent new town in Ireland is Adamstown in County Dublin. Building commenced in 2005 and it is anticipated that occupation will commence late in 2006 with the main development of 10,500 units being completed within a ten-year timescale.ItalyIn the past centuries several new towns have been planned in Italy. One of the most famous is Pienza, close to Siena, a Renaissance city, also called The Ideal Town or Utopia Town. Between 1459 and 1462 the most famous architects of Italy worked there for the Pope Pius II and built the city centre of the small town.Another example of renaissance planned cities is the walled star city of Palmanova. It is a derivative of ideal circular cities, notable Filarete's imaginary Sforzinda.In early 20th century, during the fascist government of Benito Mussolini, many new cities were founded, the most prominent being Littoria (renamed Latina after the fall of the Fascism). The city was inaugurated on December 18, 1932. Littoria was populated with immigrants coming from Northern Italy, mainly from Friuli and Veneto.The great Sicilian earthquake of 1693 forced the complete rebuilding on new plans of many towns.Other well known new cities are located close to Milan in the metropolitan area. Crespi d'Adda, a few kilometres east of Milan along the Adda River, was settled by the Crespi family. It was the first Ideal Worker's City in Italy, built close to the cotton factory. Today Crespi d'Adda is part of the Unesco World Heritage List. Cusano Milanino was settled in the first years of the 20th century in the formerly small town of Cusano. It was built as a new green city, rich in parks, villas, large boulevards and called Milanino (Little Milan). In the 1970s in the eastern metropolitan area of Milan a new city was built by Silvio Berlusconi. It is called Milano Due. It is a garden city designed for families of the upper middle class, with peculiarity of having pedestrian paths completely free of traffic. In the 1980s another two similar cities were built by Berlusconi, Milano 3 and Milano Visconti. Each of them has around 12,000 inhabitants.LithuaniaIn 1961 Elektrnai was established as planned city for workers in Elektrnai Power Plant and in 1975 Visaginas was established as planned city for workers in Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant.MacedoniaThe Municipality of Aerodrom within the City of Skopje is a planned community.Malta The fortified cities of Senglea and Valletta were both built on a grid plan by the Knights of Malta in the 16th century. The town of Paola, Malta, also known as Rahal Gdid (New Town), is built on a grid plan by the Grand Master Antoine de Paule. The towns of San wann and Santa Luija were built as planned cities in the 1960s and 1970sNetherlandsOne province of the Netherlands, Flevoland (pop. 370,000 (2006)), was reclaimed from the Zuiderzee (Southern Sea). After a flood in 1916, it was decided that the Zuiderzee, an inland sea within the Netherlands, would be closed and reclaimed. In 1932, a causeway (the Afsluitdijk) was completed, which closed off the sea completely. The Zuiderzee was subsequently called IJsselmeer (IJssel-lake) and its previously salty water became fresh.The first part of the new lake that was reclaimed was the Noordoostpolder (Northeast polder). This new land included, among others, the former island of Urk and it was included with the province of Overijssel. After this, other parts were also reclaimed: the eastern part in 1957 (Oost-Flevoland) and the southern part (Zuid-Flevoland) in 1968. The municipalities on the three parts voted to become a separate province, which happened in 1986. The capital of Flevoland is Lelystad, but the biggest city is Almere (pop. 183,500 in February 2008). Apart from these two larger cities, several 'New Villages' were built. In the Noordoostpolder the central town of Emmeloord is surrounded by ten villages, all on cycling distance from Emmeloord since that was the most popular way of transport in the 1940s (and it's still very popular). Most noteworthy of these villages is Nagele which was designed by famous modern architects of the time, Gerrit Rietveld, Aldo van Eyck, Willem Wissing and Jaap Bakema among them. The other villages were built in a more traditional/vernacular style. In the more recent Flevolandpolders four more 'New Villages' were built. Initially more villages were planned, but the introduction of cars made fewer but larger villages possible.New towns outside Flevoland are Hoofddorp and IJmuiden near Amsterdam, Hellevoetsluis and Spijkenisse near Rotterdam and the navy port Den Helder.The cities of Almere, Capelle aan den IJssel, Haarlemmermeer (also a reclaimed polder, 19th century), Nieuwegein, Purmerend and Zoetermeer are members of the European New Town Platform.Norway Oslo: After a great fire in 1624, it was decided by the then King Christian IV that the city would be moved behind the Akershus fortress. The new town, named Christiania, was laid out in a grid and is now the downtown area known as "Kvadraturen" (the Quadrature). The original town of Oslo was later incorporated into Christiania, and is now a neighborhood in eastern Oslo; Gamlebyen or "The Old City". The city of Kristiansand was formally founded in 1641 by King Christian IV. The city was granted all trade privileges on the southern coast of Norway, denying all other towns to trade with foreign states. As Oslo/Christiania before it, the city was behind a fortress, with a grid system allowing cannons to fire towards the two ports of the city and the river on the eastern end.PolandFour cities stand out as examples of planned communities in Poland: Zamo, Gdynia, Tychy and Nowa Huta. Their very diverse layouts are the result of the different aesthetics that were held as ideal during the development of each of these planned communities. Planned cities in Poland have a long history and fall primarily into three time periods during which planned towns developed in Poland and its neighbors that once comprised the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. These are the Nobleman's Republic (16th to 18th centuries), the interwar period (19181939) and Socialist Realism (19441956).The Nobleman's Republic of the Polish-Lithuanian CommonwealthThe extreme opulence that Poland's nobility enjoyed during the Renaissance left Poland's elites with not only obscene amounts of money to spend, but also motivated them to find new ways to invest their hefty fortunes out of the grasp of the Royal Treasury. Jan Zamoyski founded the city of Zamo in order to circumvent royal tariffs and duties while also serving as the capital for his mini-state. Zamo was planned by the renowned Paduan architect Bernardo Morando and modeled on Renaissance theories of the 'ideal city'. Realizing the importance of trade, Zamoyski issued special location charters for representatives of peoples traditionally engaged in trade, i.e. to Greeks, Armenians and Sephardic Jews and secured exemptions on taxes, customs duties and tolls, which contributed to its fast development. Zamoyski's success with Zamo spawned numerous other Polish nobles to found their own "private" cities such as Biaystok and many of these towns survive today, while Zamo was added to the UN World Heritage list in 1992 and is today considered one of the most precious urban complexes in Europe and in the world.Interwar periodThe preeminent example of a planned community in interwar Poland is Gdynia. After World War I when Poland regained its independence it lacked a commercial seaport (De iure Poles could use Gdask, which was the main port of the country before the War and is again today, but de facto the Germans residing in the city made it almost impossible for them), making it necessary to build one from scratch. The extensive and modern seaport facilities in Gdynia, the most modern and extensive port facilities in Europe at the time, became Poland's central port on the Baltic Sea. In the shadow of the port, the city took shape mirroring in its scope the rapid development of 19th-century Chicago, growing from a small fishing village of 1,300 in 1921 into a full blown city with a population over 126,000 less than 20 years later. The Central Business District that developed in Gdynia is a showcase of Art Deco and Modernist architectural styles and predominate much of the cityscape. There are also villas, particularly in the city's villa districts such as Kamienna Gra where Historicism inspired Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Baroque architecture.Socialist realismAfter the destruction of most Polish cities in World War II, the Communist regime that took power in Poland sought to bring about architecture that was in line with its vision of society. Thus urban complexes arose that reflected the ideals of socialist realism. This can be seen in districts of Polish cities such as Warsaw's MDM. The City of Nowa Huta (now a district of Krakw) and Tychy were built as the epitome of the proletarian future of Poland.PortugalVila Real de Santo Antnio was built after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, on the same model that was used for rebuilding Lisbon, Portugal's capital city (also destroyed in the earthquake), and on a similar orthogonal plan.RomaniaThe cities of Braila, Giurgiu and Turnu Severin were rebuilt, according to new plans, in the first part of the 19th century and the cities of Alexandria and Calarasi were built completely new the same time. The city of Victoria, located in the Braov County, was built by the communist government in the beginning of the second half of the 20th century.Russia Saint Petersburg was built by Peter the Great as a planned capital city starting in 1703. Magnitogorsk is an example of a planned industrial city based on Stalin's 1930s five-year plans. The Avtozavodsky district of Tolyatti is a planned industrial city of Soviet post-war modernism.SerbiaNovi Beograd, meaning New Belgrade in Serbian, is a municipality of the city of Belgrade, built on a previously undeveloped area on the left bank of the Sava river. The first development began in 1947, the municipality has since expanded significantly and become the fastest developing region in Serbia.

Drvengrad, meaning Wooden Town in Serbian, is a traditional village that the Serbian film director Emir Kusturica had built for his film Life Is a Miracle. It is located in the Zlatibor District near the city of Uice, two hundred kilometers southwest of Serbia's capital, Belgrade. It is located near Mokra Gora and Viegrad.Slovakia Partiznske was established in 19381939, when Jan Antonn Baa of Zln, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) and his powerful network of companies built a shoe factory in the cadastral area of imonovany municipality. The newly created settlement for workers carried the name of Baovany and was part of imonovany. With the growth of the factory, so grew the settlement. The whole municipality was renamed to Baovany in 1948 and given town status. As a sign of recognition of local inhabitants fighting in the Slovak National Uprising, the town was renamed Partiznske on 9 February 1949. Svit was established in 1934 by business industrialist Jan Antonn Baa of Zln, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) in accordance with his policy of setting up villages around the country for his workers.SloveniaNova Gorica, built after 1947 immediately to the east of the new border with Italy, in which the town of Gorizia remained.SpainDuring the 16th and 17th centuries, the population of Spain declined due to emigration to the Americas and later kings and governments made efforts to repopulate the country. In the second half of the 18th century, King Charles III implemented the so-called New Settlements (Nuevas Poblaciones) plan which would bring 10,000 immigrants from central Europe to the region of Sierra Morena. Pablo de Olavide was appointed superintendent and about forty new settlements were established of which the most notable was La Carolina, which has a perfectly rectangular grid design.Later kings and repopulation efforts led to the creation of more settlements, also with rectangular grid plans. One of them was the town of La Isabela (40.4295 N, 2.6876 W), which disappeared in the 1950s submerged under the waters of the newly created artificial lake of Buenda but is still visible just under the water in satellite imagery.Under Francisco Franco, the Instituto Nacional de Colonizacin (National Institute of Colonization) built a great number of towns and villages.Tres Cantos, near Madrid, is a good example of a successful new town design in Spain. It was built in the 1970s.Newer additional sections of large cities are often newly planned as is the case of the Salamanca district or Ciudad Lineal in Madrid or the Eixample in Barcelona.Sweden Gteborg was planned and built as a major fortified city from nothing from 1621. Karlskrona was also planned and built as a major city and naval base from nothing, beginning 1680. Vllingby, a suburb, is an example of a new town in Sweden from after 1950. Kiruna was built because of the large mine, from 1898. Arvika was also a planned city.UkraineOdesa was built as a planned city according to 18th-century plans by the Flemish engineer Franz de Wollant (also known as Franois Sainte de Wollant). The same engineer also planned the following municipalities in Ukraine in the late 18th century: Voznesensk (Ukrainian: ), in Mykolayiv Oblast Ovidiopol (Ukrainian: ), in Odesa OblastKomsomolsk, founded in the 1960, is the most prosperous planned city in Ukraine, depending on the internationally-important iron ore mining business.Prypiat is another new city in Ukraine built in 1970. The city was abandoned on April 27, 1986 after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. On April 26 the city had 50.000 habitants, the majority working at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Now the abandoned town is highly contaminated by radiation. Most of the Prypiat's former inhabitants were resettled to Slavutych which was planned and built for that purpose.United KingdomEngland and ScotlandThe Romans planned many towns in Britain, but the settlements were changed out of all recognition in subsequent centuries. The town of Winchelsea is said to be the first post-Roman new town in Britain, constructed to a grid system under the instructions of King Edward I in 1280, and largely completed by 1292. Another claimant to the title is Salisbury, established in the early 13th century by the then Bishop of Sarum. The best known pre-20th-century new town in the UK was undoubtedly the Edinburgh New Town, built in accordance with a 1766 master plan by James Craig, and (along with Bath and Dublin) the archetype of the elegant Georgian style of British architecture.The term "new town" often refers in the UK to towns built after World War II under the New Towns Act 1946. These were influenced by the garden city movement, launched around 1900 by Ebenezer Howard and Sir Patrick Geddes and the work of Raymond Unwin, and manifested at Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire.Following World War II, some 28 projected towns were designated as New Towns under the 1946 Act, and were developed partly to house the large numbers of people whose homes had been destroyed by bombing during the war and partly to move parts of the population out of (mainly Victorian) urban slums. New Towns policy was also informed by a series of wartime commissions, including: the Barlow Commission (1940) into the distribution of industrial population, the Scott Committee into rural land use (1941) the Uthwatt Committee into compensation and betterment (1942) (later) the Reith Report into New Towns (1947).Also crucial to thinking was the Abercrombie Plan for London (1944), which envisaged moving a million and a half people from London to new and expanded towns. A similar plan was developed for the Clyde Valley in 1946 to combat similar problems faced in Glasgow. Together these committees reflected a strong consensus to halt the uncontrolled sprawl of London and other large cities. For some, this consensus was tied up with a concern for social welfare reform (typified by the Beveridge Report), as typified in the motto if we can build better, we can live better; for others, such as John Betjeman it was a more conservative objection to the changing character of existing towns.Following the building of Borehamwood, Middlesex, 12 miles north-west of central London, the first in a ring of major "first generation" New Towns around London (1946) were Stevenage, Hertfordshire, 27 miles to the north of London, and Basildon, Essex, 25 miles east of London along the River Thames. Hertfordshire built four other new towns, two in the vicinity of Stevenage (Welwyn Garden City and Hatfield), a third to the north called Letchworth, and Hemel Hempstead to the west. (Hall 1996: 133) New Towns in the North East were also planned such as Newton Aycliffe (which the social reformer and government adviser William Beveridge wanted to be the "ideal town to live in") and Peterlee. Two new towns were also planned in Scotland at East Kilbride (1947) and Glenrothes (1948). Bracknell in Berkshire, to the south-west of London, was designated a New Town in 1949 and is still expanding. Other London new towns from this era include Harlow in Essex and Crawley in West Sussex.Later a scatter of "second-generation" towns were built to meet specific problems, such as the development of the Corby Steelworks. Finally, five "third-generation" towns were launched in the late 1960s: these were larger, some of them based on substantial existing settlements such as Peterborough, and the most famous was probably Milton Keynes, midway between London and Birmingham, known for its huge central park and shopping centre, designed from the outset as a new city though in law it is a 'New Town'. The 1960s saw new towns crop up around England's second-city Birmingham, namely Redditch, Tamworth and Telford.Other towns, such as Ashford in Kent, Basingstoke in Hampshire and Swindon in Wiltshire, were designated "Expanded Towns" and share many characteristics with the new towns. Scotland also gained three more new towns: Cumbernauld in 1956, famous for its enclosed 'town centre', Livingston (1962) and Irvine (1966).In spite of the relative success of new towns in the London Metropolitan green belt, London continued to suffer from a chronic housing shortage, especially in the south-east. Another small New Town, Thamesmead, was developed adjacent to the Thames in the early 1960s but suffered from poor transport links. Some improvement in infrastructure has been seen subsequently.All the new towns featured a car-oriented layout with many roundabouts and a grid-based road system unusual in the old world. Milton Keynes in particular was designed with a grid-based distributor road system. The earlier new towns, where construction was often rushed and whose inhabitants were generally plucked out of their established communities with little ceremony, rapidly got a poor press reputation as the home of "new town blues".These issues were systematically addressed in the later towns, with the third generation towns in particular devoting substantial resources to cycle routes, public transport and community facilities, as well as employing teams of officers for social development work.The financing of the UK new towns was creative. Land within the designated area was acquired at agricultural use value by the development corporation for each town, and infrastructure and building funds borrowed on 60-year terms from the UK Treasury. Interest on these loans was rolled up, in the expectation that the growth in land values caused by the development of the town would eventually allow the loans to be repaid in full. However, the high levels of retail price inflation experienced in the developed world in the 1970s and 1980s fed through into interest rates and frustrated this expectation, so that substantial parts of the loans had ultimately to be written off.All New Towns designated under the New Towns Act of 1946 were serviced by a secretariat, the New Towns Association, a quango that reported to the New Towns Directorate of the Department of the Environment. It coordinated the work of the General Managers and technical officers, published a monthly information bulletin and provided information for visitors from around the world. As each New Town reached maturity, the town's assets were taken over by the Commission for New Towns. Set up in 1948, the New Towns Association was dissolved in 1998. All papers held by it and the Commission for New Towns are held in The National archives:From the 1970s the first generation towns began to reach their initial growth targets. As they did so, their development corporations were wound up and the assets disposed of: rented housing to the local authority, and other assets to the Commission for the New Towns (in England; but alternative arrangements were made in Scotland and Wales). The Thatcher Government, from 1979, saw the new towns as a socialist experiment to be discontinued, and all the development corporations were dissolved by 1992 (with the closure of Milton Keynes Development Corporation), even for the third generation towns whose growth targets were still far from being achieved. Ultimately the Commission for the New Towns was also dissolved and its assets - still including a lot of undeveloped land - passed to the English Industrial Estates Corporation (later known as English Partnerships).Many of the New Towns attempted to incorporate public art and cultural programmes but with mixed methods and results. In Harlow the architect in charge of the design of the new town, Frederick Gibberd, founded the Harlow Art Trust and used it to purchase works by leading sculptors, including Auguste Rodin, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. In Peterlee the abstract artist Victor Pasmore was appointed part of the design team, which led to the building of the Apollo Pavilion. Washington New Town was provided with a community theatre and art gallery. The public art in Milton Keynes includes the (in)famous Concrete Cows, which resulted from the work of an 'artist in residence' and have gone on to become a recognised landmark. Glenrothes led the way in Scotland being the first new town to appoint a town artist in 1968. A massive range of artworks (around 132 in total) ranging from concrete hippos to bronze statues, dancing children, giant flowers, a dinosaur, a horse and chariot and crocodiles, to name but a few, were created. Town artists appointed in Glenrothes include David Harding and Malcolm Robertson.In the 1990s, an experimental "new town" was developed by the Prince of Wales to use very traditional or vernacular architectural styles was started at Poundbury in Dorset.Northern IrelandIn Northern Ireland, building of Craigavon in County Armagh commenced in 1966 between Lurgan and Portadown, although entire blocks of flats and shops lay empty, and later derelict, before eventually being bulldozed. The area, which now has a population exceeding 80,000 is mostly a dormitory town for Belfast.Londonderry was the first ever planned city in Ireland (the city is now located in Northern Ireland). Work began on building the new city across the River Foyle from the ancient town of Derry (Doire Cholm Chille or Doire) in 1613. The walls were actually completed five years later in 1618. The central diamond within a walled city with four gates was thought to be a good design for defence. In 1963 under the Matthew Plan the new city of Craigavon was founded out of the original towns of Portadown and Lurgan. This town today lies mostly incomplete as the troubles halted construction. The plan initially was to construct a relief settlement to take people out of the crowded city of Belfast.ScotlandIn the late 1950s and early 1960s Scotland saw a creation of several "post-war new towns". These were; Cumbernauld, East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Irvine and Livingston. Each of these towns are in Scotland's list of 20 most populated towns and cities. East Kilbride is the second largest town in Scotland, or the 6th largest settlement with a population of over 73,000 and Livingston with a population of 76,000. The other three towns are not as big with populations between 30,000 and 50,000.WalesThe only new towns in Wales have been Newtown and Cwmbran. Cwmbran was established to provide new employment in the south eastern portion of the South Wales Coalfield. The town is perhaps most widely known now for its international sports stadium and shopping centre.