ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the early media response to Milton Keynes, from the time of its designation in 1967, to the end of the first wave of media coverage which followed the publication of The Plan for Milton Keynes in 1971. It examines how the misinformation and preconceptions about the legacy of earlier plans for North Bucks New City shaped initial media representations, and the way in which early coverage expressed anxieties about the city’s potential to be too indeterminate, or too “foreign” in its form. The chapter discusses the way in which The Plan for Milton Keynes sought to reconceptualise the role of urban planning as a fundamentally open, non-deterministic practice, and proposed a new kind of flexible low-density landscape to support that vision. The chapter closes with discussion of the way in which these aspects of the Plan did not substantially alter the emphasis on determinacy, foreign imposition and erasure of the rural landscape in the town’s national print media coverage.
