An evidence-based approach to designing new cities: the English New Towns revisited

Urbanism is confronting remarkable challenges today. Current statistics show that over half of the rapidly-growing world population lives in an urban environment. Rapidly-growing cities of the developing world, from China to the MiddleEast and South America, are building at incredible rates. In Shanghai alone, several dozen new towns have been planned to accommodate an average of 800,000 by 2020 (Grootens and Hartog 2010). The most common answer to all these challenges, at least in the fastest-growing part of the world, is building more cities and building them from scratch.