ABSTRACT
Looking at the cities that were built from scratch during the 1950s and 1960s across the world, it is astonishing to see how uniform the manner was in which the world population growth was spatially accommodated in places extremely remote from, and different in culture and political background to one another. The roots of this phenomenon go back to the New Towns built around London from the 1940s, which soon became the panacea for urban growth in western Europe. The new cities around Stockholm, Hoogvliet in the Netherlands and the Villes Nouvelles around Paris all prolonged the ideas of the garden city movement and the neighbourhood unit, and share the same DNA.
