Planned cities are settlements that are carefully planned from their inception. They are typically constructed on previously more or less undeveloped land.
Old towns are urban districts from before the 19th century. Some of them are planned from the beginning; others have grown organically from village size.
Some planned cities were designed as national capitals; see government and politics tourism. They normally have a legislature and an official residence building in a prominent location, as well as museums and ceremonial buildings.
Destinations
[edit]
Map of Planned cities
Africa
[edit]Asia
[edit]- 3 Astana
- 4 Islamabad
- 5 Nara — the capital of the first strong centralized Japanese state, with its layout based of that of Chang'an, the capital of China during the contemporaneous Tang Dynasty.
- 6 Kyoto — the second imperial capital of Japan, a status which it held until after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, with its layout also based on that of Chang'an.
- 7 Naypyidaw
- 8 Priene & Miletus — ruins of two ancient Greek cities close to each other on Turkey's western coast, both early planned communities. Priene featured one of the earliest grids, remarkably on a steep mountainside. Miletus was also renowned for its grid, and was the hometown of Hippodamus, considered to be the father of urban planning – "Hippodamian plan" is another term for a grid plan.
- 9 Putrajaya
- 10 Quezon City
- 11 Sri Jayawardenapura Kotte
India
[edit]West Bengal
[edit]- 17 Durgapur – an industrial city designed by Chief Minister Bidhan Chandra Roy, Joseph Allen Stein and Benjamin Polk in 1955. Originally developed as a steel city with the Durgapur Steel Plant (DSP), Durgapur later expanded to hydroelectric, thermal power, rail manufacturing and even IT.
- 18 New Town (Rajarhat) – a satellite town east of Kolkata, developed under the leadership of Chief Minister Jyoti Basu in the late 1990s on huge acres of cultivable lands and water bodies. Intended to reduce the urban pressure of Kolkata, New Town is now an emerging hub for IT, fintech, housing and smart urban infrastructure.
- 19 Salt Lake (Bidhannagar) – an older satellite town east of Kolkata, designed by Yugoslav architect Dobrivoje Tošković to accommodate the burgeoning population of the city due to the Partition of India in 1947. It was developed under the leadership of Chief Minister Bidhan Chandra Roy between 1958 and 1963 on reclaimed wetlands, with Sector V being developed into Kolkata's IT hub in the 1990s. In addition, the Central Park area functions as Kolkata's second administrative district after B. B. D. Bagh, which is part of an effort to decongest the city.
Europe
[edit]- 20 Gdynia – planned port city built from scratch in interwar Poland, full of modernist buildings from the era.
- 21 Gothenburg – as the Danish Empire held much of Scandinavia's western coast, Sweden's only Atlantic port up to the 17th century was at the Göta river. The old city was commissioned by King Gustavus II Adolphus. Since the 19th century, Gothenburg has been Sweden's main industrial city.
- 22 Helsinki – planned port city founded in the 16th century by King Gustav Vasa of Sweden with the aim of competing with Tallinn as a trading city. It wasn't successful at that time, but in the 19th century it was revived in a nearby location, now planned as the capital of Finland by order of Tsar Alexander I. It took half a century for it to surpass the former capital Turku in population, but the street layout in the centre and buildings in some central areas follow the original plan, with the architecture designed to resemble that of the Imperial Russian capital Saint Petersburg.
- 23 Paris – while the city has a long history as unplanned settlement, modern Paris is the result of a complete demolition of former cramped medieval neighbourhoods and significant reconstruction of the entire city to a modern standard in the mid-19th century, also known as Hausmann's renovation.
- 24 Pompeii – the ancient Roman city is like various other Roman cities in having a grid throughout most of its area.
- 25 Saint Petersburg – new capital of Russia founded in the early 18th century by Peter the Great on land newly conquered from Sweden as a 'window on Europe' with lots of huge French-influenced neoclassical buildings and wide boulevards meant to impress Western guests
- 26 Wolfsburg – factory town and headquarters of car manufacturer Volkswagen. After World War II, it produced the famous Volkswagen Beetle.
- 27 Yerevan – Armenia's capital as it exists today is widely regarded as one of the best surviving examples of an early Soviet planned city, having been laid out on a radial-circular plan with what is today Republic Square as its core by the architect Alexander Tamanian in 1924.
- 28 Milton Keynes – a mid to late 20th century planned community, although it incorporates the existing centres of Bletchley and Wolverton.
- 29 Letchworth Garden City, 30 Welwyn Garden City – 20th century examples of the Garden city approach to urban planning.
North America
[edit]- 31 Cancun — Cancun did not exist in 1970 when the federal tourism ministry (FONATUR) began exploring the idea of creating a tourism utopia of Caribbean beaches lined with modern hotels. The city was designed with tourism infrastructure concentrated on a strip of barrier beach supported by a city for locals designed around the concept of supermanzanas built up of manzanas. Supermanzanas are essentially self-contained neighborhood units while manzanas are essentially what blocks are in other cities.
- 32 Celebration — Built next to Walt Disney World and originally developed by the Walt Disney Company as a planned community, with shared amenities that are for the exclusive use of the town's residents. The downtown area is known for its pastel-colored low-rise buildings in a beautiful setting by the lakefront.
- 33 Manhattan — The City of New York, which then consisted of Manhattan only, introduced a street grid plan in 1811 for streets from 14th to the Washington Heights neighborhood uptown. The grid starts with 1st Street just north of Houston Street, but only on the East Side; the West Village does not have a grid, so it is only starting at 14th Street that there is a consistent grid across the entire island, with a few notable exceptions such as the preexisting course of Broadway. Manhattan's grid is certainly not the first, but it was nevertheless an important achievement that set the stage for the next two centuries of orderly development and navigation through the city's streets.
- 34 Ottawa — Originally a small lumbering town before Queen Victoria chose it to be the capital of Canada (in order to sidestep the rivalry between Toronto and Montreal and ensure a stronger defense against possible U.S. attack), the city shows many European influences. The Parliament buildings resemble Britain's and, though it is no longer obvious, Elgin Street was originally a broad avenue patterned after the Champs Elysee in Paris.
- 35 Kanata — a suburb of Ottawa
- 36 Washington, D.C. — The purpose-built capital of the United States, initially laid out on a diamond-shaped plan by Pierre Charles L’Enfant on both banks of the Potomac River, on land that was ceded by the states of Maryland and Virginia. The portion on the west bank of the Potomac River was returned to Virginia in 1847, but it is still effectively part of the D.C. metropolitan area, and home to The Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery. If you look at a map of what remains of the District of Columbia today, it still reflects the original diamond-shaped plan on the east bank of the Potomac River.
- 37 Greenbelt — A town between Washington DC and Baltimore, closer to the former.
Oceania
[edit]- 38 Adelaide — Built on a plan by Colonel William Light, the capital of South Australia is known for its orderly grid system in the city centre and North Adelaide, and the surrounding parklands that separate them from each other and from the suburbs.
- 39 Canberra — The purpose-built national capital of Australia, with its layout designed by the American husband-and-wife pair of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin.
- 40 Griffith and 41 Leeton are two small regional cities in the Riverina region of New South Wales also planned by Burley Griffin.