ABSTRACT
What differentiates the culture of the planned community from other cultures of
urbanism is its exclusive focus on the complete, well-designed, and self-contained
unit of human settlement. Planned communities of all sorts – ranging from
neighbourhood units to towns and complete cities – are united by a common,
optimistic purpose. All are asking, and attempting to answer, the same question:
can the ideal human settlement be planned coherently and all at once, as a separate,
distinct entity? Advocates of the planned community working in the late nineteenth
and early to mid-twentieth centuries thought so. Many believed that planning for
complete communities was necessary to ensure the quality of the environment.
