ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Milton Keynes’ reception in national politics, media and popular culture from 1972–1975. It traces the role of the changing political and economic climate in changing attitudes to state planning, and to postwar state-sponsored urban planning and planned landscapes within that. In particular, the iconography of the tower block as a symbol of the inherent determinism of urban planning became increasingly prominent during this period. MKDC sought to leverage this antipathy to particular planned landscapes, including the tower block, by presenting Milton Keynes as a new kind of urban planning which rejected determinism. This approach, however, relied on understanding urban planning practice as able to be reformed, rather than as being inherently and necessarily associated with forceful deterministic design and with the policies of an interventionist state. As this idea of the state itself came under increasing critique, so too did the landscape forms associated with it.
