While international analysts pick over the combatants’ ambitions in the Iran conflict, Smart Growth UK has been looking at what the Government imagines it’s achieving with its “new towns” policy. Those inverted commas are significant. Our report examines the New Towns Taskforce recommended sites for 12 “new towns” and finds them to be a bizarre mixture of the greenfield sprawl […]
Dangerous times need a united front
If any historians survive the environmental crises to come, they will look back on the political follies of the 2020s with horror. While the international rise of fascism mirrors many aspects of the 1930s, current economic fantasies are more reminiscent of the 1980s. The financial deregulation of that decade led directly to the 1990 and 2008 crashes, while that decade’s […]
New towns, old mistakes
New towns are much in the news at the moment – not least at the house builders’ house magazine, The Times. Just this week, Emma Duncan’s column was apologising for the mess that post-war towns created and claiming the “next iteration” (you have been warned) needs to get five things right: place, politics, plan, people and money. No pressure then. […]