Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-qsmjn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T05:34:11.065Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Planning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2019

Guy Ortolano
Affiliation:
New York University
Get access

Summary

Chapter 2, “Planning,” examines a consequential moment in urban history, after Jane Jacobs but before OPEC. The question of the future city animated the 1967 competition to plan the most significant project in the world’s leading new towns program, Milton Keynes. Yet the plan that resulted attracted criticism for its banality, and so this chapter recovers the ideas that motivated the city’s planning in order to re-enchant The Plan for Milton Keynes (1970). The story features three characters: the chairman, Jock Campbell, a sixth-generation sugar magnate whose anti-communist campaigns in British Guiana left him wary of grand designs; the planner, Richard Llewelyn-Davies, a welfare state architect-planner whose plan for Milton Keynes propelled him into a thriving global practice; and the visionary, Melvin Webber, an American urban futurist who paradoxically persuaded the new town’s makers that the future could not be known. Together with their colleagues, these figures dared to reimagine both the city and the future, but their refusal of bold designs left a void which eventually became filled by roundabouts and concrete cows.

Type
Chapter
Information
Thatcher's Progress
From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town
, pp. 69 - 107
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Planning
  • Guy Ortolano, New York University
  • Book: Thatcher's Progress
  • Online publication: 08 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108697262.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Planning
  • Guy Ortolano, New York University
  • Book: Thatcher's Progress
  • Online publication: 08 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108697262.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Planning
  • Guy Ortolano, New York University
  • Book: Thatcher's Progress
  • Online publication: 08 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108697262.003
Available formats
×