ABSTRACT
It would certainly be a remarkable opportunity if the occasion presented itself for the building of an entirely new city to the design set out in Chapter 7. Although the purpose of the exercise was, as emphasised, a theoretical one, to tease out certain important lessons, a city designed on these lines could still be built. Unfortunately, the opportunities to construct entirely new cities on empty sites are, in reality, very few. Examples around the world are generally limited to new capitals and the experience with them is not something that should be guide to standard city building. Their design is distorted by the requirements, ambitions, and often vanity, of the governments concerned. The instructive examples of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities in England in the early twentieth century have already been mentioned but they are of a ‘town’ scale of less than 100,000 population. For cities in excess of 200,000 population, aside from the new national capitals, probably the only example of a completely planned and free-standing large city, built on a greenfield site in the twentieth century, is that of Milton Keynes, also in England, which has also already been discussed in Chapter 7, and elsewhere, in this book. Nevertheless, the results obtained from the analysis of the theoretical model do have practical application and it is the intention of this book that it should make a useful contribution to practice. The practical applications come under two broad headings: urban extensions and urban intensification. However, before discussing them, it is first necessary to examine the principal differences between the theoretical model and planning practice.
