Thousands of new cities have been built throughout history and many are being planned now. Some of the world’s great cities draw on long histories – from Rome and Paris to London, Istanbul, Delhi, Beijing and Cairo. But others are relatively recent creations, including some of the great capitals of the world including Washington DC, Canberra, Brasília and Astana.
Recent decades have brought a surge of new city creation as urban populations have mushroomed. Prominent examples include Shenzen in southern China, transformed from a village to a vast high-tech metropolis in the course of a generation, and Pudong, the gleaming new city right next to Shanghai, both of which provided inspiration for over 600 new cities that have been built in China since 1949. Other examples include Songdo near Incheon in South Korea, Putrajaya in Malaysia, Masdar in the UAE, Sri near Chennai in India, and Skolkovo near Moscow. Some are entirely new and distinct, but there is also a related tradition of huge developments within cities: examples range from Baron Haussmann’s Paris and Jože Plečnik’s plans in Ljubljana to Mussolini’s Rome, Canary Wharf in London and Gurgaon in Delhi.
While many try to copy Dubai and Singapore, others try to be distinct. Some plan an unusual physical form (like Neom’s plans for a 170km linear city, which appeared to be stalling in 2024). Others embody an unusual idea (like Bhutan’s plans for the Gelephu Mindfulness City linking it to India, announced in December 2023).
Themes for new cities
What drives this interest in building cities from scratch? We can distinguish at least six main guiding ideas in recent examples:
Capitals - The first is to build new capitals with better prospects and geography. Putrajaya, created as an administrative capital for Malaysia, close to Kuala Lumpur which remains the formal capital, is a prime example from the late 20th century. Nusantara, the proposed new capital of Indonesia which will be located in Borneo, is a prime current example. There had been signs that the new President Prabowo Subianto had doubts about it, but in October 2024 he called for major buildings to be completed within four years.
Entrepots - A second is to grow economic entrepots – here the aim is to create new cities with different governance and rules that can attract in investment and trade. The inspiration often comes from Hong Kong, with Shenzen the most successful example. Others include Khorgos on the border of China and Kazakhstan, which aims to be a centre of a revived silk road, and the various ‘charter city’ projects, most unrealised, from Madagascar to Honduras and Nigeria.
Growth engines - A third is to enable new engines for economic growth as part of strategies for diversification. Neom and King Abdullah Economic city in Saudi Arabia are the biggest contemporary examples, intended to pioneer a more diversified future economy. Tatu, near Nairobi, is a relative success story in Kenya, that’s attracted a lot of investment and jobs.
Smart cities - A fourth, related goal is to nurture high tech, particularly ‘smart cities’, suitable for the industries of the 21st century. The idea of cities built around sensors, AI and digital has been fashionable for several decades, and avidly promoted by companies like Cisco and IBM. Songdo and Masdar are amongst the most visible examples, and there are many in the pipeline (including a potential new tech city in Solano, California). However, the smart city idea has had a mixed record, with many of the technology-inspired new cities falling flat, including the Google/Sidewalk Labs project on Toronto waterfront (discontinued in 2020), Lavasa in India, HOPE in Ghana, Konza in Kenya and PLanIT in Portugal. The most impressive examples of smart city ideas in practice are mainly to be found in existing cities such as Singapore.
Science cities - A fifth aim has been to create cities devoted to science or space. This has been particularly favoured in Russia which launched a series of science cities in the 1950s – under the label ‘Akademgorodok’ - and then another series labelled ‘Naukograd’ in the 2000s, starting with Obninsk (there are now 14). As with smart cities, however, the idea of separate science cities has not generally succeeded: all the top-ranked science cities in the world are existing large cities (in the latest ranking from Nature, for example, Beijing, New York and Shanghai came top).
Eco-cities - A sixth stream of thinking has focused on the environment, with the aim of creating cities that would be full of nature. The garden cities that spread from England in the late 19th century were quite successful, promising an alternative to overcrowded, dirty industrial cities. More recently a similar ideal inspired ecotowns like Vauban in Freiburg and Ørestad in Copenhagen. There have also been much-hyped failures like Dongtan in China.
What shapes success or failure?
What counts as success? Most new cities are clear about their goals and there are some obvious measures: growth in population and GDP; attractiveness, whether to potential residents, investors or visitors; well-being.
So what makes some succeed and others fail? There are many famous examples from the past, all of which failed in their stated objectives, which give some pointers. Perhaps the most impressive is Fatehpur Sikri near Delhi,which aimed to become a lasting capital. Another fascinating historic example is Palmanova near Venice, which was intended to be a defensible perfect city built like a star. In the 20th century, Stalin’s Magnitogorsk, intended to be a powerhouse of industry and science, stands out as a particularly striking example of failure.
Some of the failures never moved far beyond concepts (like Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, Albert Seer’s Germania or Tandy Industries plan for a wholly enclosed city in Alaska in the 1960s). Some failed almost as soon as they started (like Henry Ford’s Fordlandia in Brazil); and some verge on the comic, like the Octagon vegetarian city attempted in Kansas in the 1850s.
There are even more examples of failed developments near or within cities, from Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis in the US to Skopje’s flawed rebuilding after an earthquake in 1963.
More recent striking failures include Ordos, the Chinese attempt to create a new hub in Mongolia (pictured at the start of this piece), and there are others whose success remains unclear, such as Naypidaw, the new capital of Myanmar, which is widely seen as a huge waste of money that has achieved little real city life or dynamism.
This suggests a crucial point. Most of the failures simply ran out of money or couldn’t raise the investment needed. But if you throw enough money at a new city it is likely to succeed in some senses – people will move there, as will investment, services and more. However, the ratio of urban dynamism to money spent will be low.
So can we draw any conclusions? Here I suggest some general lessons for anyone seeking to plan, design and build a new city.
First, get the basics right. That means infrastructure that works; good connections to other cities (and often proximity to an already thriving city); and clear leadership and ownership (which can be either public or private sector: what matters is the ability to make decisions).
Second, avoid over-abstraction. It’s tempting to commit to a beautiful image of an ideal city, manifest in pictures and models. But real cities are necessarily messier and more lively than this. They live through the rhythms of daily life rather than two or three-dimensional representations. Over-abstraction tends to lead to errors. An extreme example is the Soviet Union’s planned utopian socialist cities in the 1920s and 1930s, the "new socialist cities", or “Sotsgorods’ that brought in western (mainly German and Dutch) architects to design them. Some 20 were built, across Siberia, but no one would describe them now as utopias. Too many more recent plans have echoed their errors, with overly abstract ideals detached from reality or the everyday needs of the people who will end up living and working in the city.
Third, accept incompleteness. No plan can possibly encompass the complexity of a real, living city. The planners need to think in terms of an interaction, or dialectic, between a plan and vision on the one hand and its realisation on the other. It will be necessary to have some frameworks in place – where to put streets into a grid; how to put in place infrastructures and transport hubs; how to ensure central plazas. But these should be thought of as platforms leaving plenty of space for iteration and adaptation, and growth in response to demand.
Fourth, seek out functional logics. Cities exist to do things and they only survive if their functional logic works. That functional logic can be administrative or governmental, and if a government has sufficient will power, and willingness to commit capital or shift functions then it is possible to create a new capital. But if the logic is to be economic then there has to be a plausible plan for attracting in activities – comparative advantage, concentrations of capability, trading routes, a port. That logic may be digital – as in Cyberjaya in Malaysia – or proximity to an airport enabling an ‘aerotropolis’ like Songdo. But many new city plans leap too far from current capabilities to an imagined future, an error made by the many attempts to copy Silicon Valley or Dubai.
Fifth, think of the city in relation to other cities. Cities help other cities to grow, which is why it was smart to put Shenzen next to Hong Kong and Pudong next to Shanghai. Being too far away from other cities may hinder growth. Too many plans imagine the city economy as self-contained (the great insight of Jane Jacobs is that cities grow by both importing from, and exporting to, other cities).
Sixth, healthy cities are multiple not singular. Even if they begin with a primary function – a port, administration, car-making – they quickly become a home for complementary tasks and capabilities. And since their prime initial function may become obsolete it’s vital to diversify their base to allow them to adapt.
Seventh, technology is a tool not a guide as cities are social phenomena. Too many new city projects have fetishised technology or infrastructures. Yet if we look to the past it’s obvious that cities needed to make the most of technologies – whether canals or railways, electricity or telephones – but not to become overly defined by them. Many planners still focus only on the hardware: buildings, roads, infrastructures. But real cities are full of society in all its senses: communities, groups, civil society, relationships, enthusiasms. So wise planners take account of this from the start, for example involving some of the people who will live in the city in its planning and evolution as well as exploiting technology. Google Sidewalk Labs failure in Toronto is an object lesson in how to get this wrong.
Eighth, new cities are helped by imagination, an idea, even a myth. Throughout history cities have had founding stories that linked their present and future to the past. Too many of the new cities had too thin and uninspiring a narrative. Yet cities have to attract people – which is only partly a matter of practicalities and jobs, but also involves a compelling account of what the city will become.
Finally, cities need a capacity for both design and organic evolution – that requires building in ways that do not lock in one particular era. An oddity of recent decades is that it’s turned out that older buildings were often more flexible than more recent ones – allowing the dynamic creative and innovation districts in big cities in 19th century warehouses and factory buildings rather than 1960s office blocks.
To sum these points up. The mental model for building a new city should be less about completion of a plan but rather the initiation of a dynamic. It should seek flows and circuits as much as structures. It should see the city as a platform not a palace. And it should see the city in relationship to existing cities not as something standalone. These are the strong lessons of history. But I suspect that many will continue to be ignored - because of a combination of megalomania on the part of clients seeking grandiose expressions of their power, and consultant greed that inevitably favours perfected PowerPoint presentations over realism.
Comments