A planned community, planned city, planned town, or planned settlement is any community that was carefully planned from its inception and is typically constructed on previously undeveloped land. This contrasts with settlements that evolve organically.
Sir Ebenezer Howard was an English urban planner and founder of the garden city movement, known for his publication To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), the description of a utopian city in which people live harmoniously together with nature. The publication resulted in the founding of the garden city movement, and the building of the first garden city, Letchworth Garden City, commenced in 1903.
Hemel Hempstead is a town in the Dacorum district in Hertfordshire, England. It is 24 miles (39 km) northwest of London. The population at the 2021 census was 95,961.
Welwyn Garden City is a town in Hertfordshire, England, 20 miles (32 km) north of London. It was the second garden city in England and one of the first new towns. It is unique in being both a garden city and a new town and exemplifies the physical, social and cultural planning ideals of the periods in which it was built.
Watford is a town and borough in Hertfordshire, England, 15 mi (24 km) north-west of Central London, on the banks of the River Colne.
A semi-detached house is a single family duplex dwelling house that shares one common wall with the next house. The name distinguishes this style of house from detached houses, with no shared walls, and terraced houses, with a shared wall on both sides. Often, semi-detached houses are built in pairs in which each house's layout is a mirror image of the other's.
Orton is a suburb of the City of Peterborough, in Cambridgeshire, England, about 3 miles (4.8 km) south west of Peterborough city centre to the south of the River Nene. It is located on the route of the A1.
Glenrothes is a town situated in the heart of Fife, in east-central Scotland. It had a population of 39,277 in the 2011 census, making it the third largest settlement in Fife and the 18th most populous locality in Scotland. Glenrothes is the administrative capital of Fife, containing the headquarters of both Fife Council and Police Scotland Fife Division and is a major service centre within the area.
Chelmsley Wood, sometimes called just Chelmsley, is a town and civil parish in the Metropolitan Borough of Solihull, West Midlands, England, with a population of 12,453. It is located near Birmingham Airport and the National Exhibition Centre. It lies about eight miles east of Birmingham City Centre and 5 miles to the north of Solihull. The town is also close to both Coleshill and Water Orton in Warwickshire, the county the area was historically part of.
The Bruce Report is the name commonly given to the First Planning Report to the Highways and Planning Committee of the Corporation of the City of Glasgow published in March 1945. It influenced an intensive programme of regeneration and rebuilding efforts which took place in the city and surroundings from the mid-1950s and lasted until the late 1970s. The author was Robert Bruce, Glasgow Corporation Engineer at the time.
The New Towns Acts were a series of Acts of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to found new settlements or to expand substantially existing ones, to establish Development Corporations to deliver them, and to create a Commission to wind up the Corporations and take over their assets and liabilities. Of these, the more substantive acts were the New Towns Act 1946 and the Town Development Act 1952. "The New Towns Act [1946] was intended to pre-emptively direct urban growth and infrastructural development into new towns, thereby decentralising population and economic opportunity while inhibiting urban sprawl."
This history of Milton Keynes details its development from the earliest human settlements, through the plans for a 'new city' for 250,000 people in northern Southeast England, its subsequent urban design and development, to the present day. Milton Keynes, founded in 1967, is the largest settlement and only city in Buckinghamshire. At the 2021 census, the population of its urban area was estimated to have exceeded 256,000.
The Centre Cumbernauld is the commercial centre of the new town of Cumbernauld, Scotland. It was designed in the 1950s—as what became known as a megastructure—to be a town centre consisting of "one huge multi-storey building," according to its preliminary planning report, housing shops, apartments, a hotel, ice rink, police station and other amenities.
An overspill estate is a housing estate planned and built for the housing of excess population in urban areas, both from the natural increase of population and often in order to rehouse people from decaying inner city areas, usually as part of the process of slum clearance. They were created on the outskirts of most large British towns and during most of the 20th century, with new towns being an alternative approach outside London after World War II. The objective of this was to bring more economic activity to these smaller communities, whilst relieving pressure on overpopulated areas of major cities. The Town Development Act 1952 encouraged the expansion of neighbouring urban areas rather than the creation of satellite communities. The authorities wished to divert people living in poor conditions within highly populous cities to better conditions on the outskirts of these cities. Overspill not only involves moving people to a new area, but requires industry and employment to follow. Often the industries and resources took longer to migrate than the people, hence there were a number of issues surrounding early overspill projects. Slum clearance tenants often had problems with the move, since it separated them from extended family and friends, needed services were often lacking, and only the better off workers could afford the extra cost of commuting back to their jobs. Another criticism was that the new estates occupied what had been productive agricultural land.
Letchworth Garden City, commonly known as Letchworth, is a town in the North Hertfordshire district of Hertfordshire, England. It is noted for being the first garden city. The population at the time of the 2021 census was 33,990.
The Metropolitan Green Belt is a statutory green belt around London, England. It comprises parts of Greater London, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent and Surrey, parts of two of the three districts of Bedfordshire and a small area in Copthorne, Sussex. As of 2017/18, Government statistics show the planning designation covered 513,860 hectares of land.
Crawley Development Corporation was set up in February 1947 by the Government of the United Kingdom to establish, administer and control the development of the New Town of Crawley in accordance with the New Towns Act 1946. The Corporation had the task of growing the ancient Sussex market town of Crawley from a population of 9,000 to 40,000 by the early 1960s, expanding its commercial and industrial base and developing a balanced, socially cohesive community. A master plan supplied by planning consultant Anthony Minoprio would guide the Corporation's work. The "energy and enthusiasm" of its chairman Thomas Bennett helped it meet many of its targets early, and it was formally dissolved in 1962. Its assets passed to the Commission for New Towns in that year; they are now owned privately or by the local authority, Crawley Borough Council.
Public housing in the United Kingdom, also known as council housing or social housing, provided the majority of rented accommodation until 2011 when the number of households in private rental housing surpassed the number in social housing. Dwellings built for public or social housing use are built by or for local authorities and known as council houses. Since the 1980s non-profit housing associations became more important and subsequently the term "social housing" became widely used, as technically council housing only refers to housing owned by a local authority, though the terms are largely used interchangeably.
