How to Build a New Town
- Francesca Parmenter
- Sep 26
- 1 min read
Updated: Oct 1
As a planning and masterplanning practice conceived and based in the new town of Milton Keynes, and with our 35 years’ experience of designing and delivering new town-scale growth, we await with interest the government’s shortlist for the next generation of New Towns.
We know what it takes to influence, shape and deliver a new town, whether that is alighting on a new geography or exploring the considered expansion of an existing place. Milton Keynes is now a ‘living laboratory’ for how to build a new town: born of a single strategic plan with a shelf life of half a century, delivering on its original place and purpose with a masterplan framework universally understood by those who reside within it, and where change is viewed positively and works within the original plan.
Earlier this year, the New Towns Taskforce published a set of emerging common principles to provide the ‘building blocks’ for a new town. There is nothing wrong with these broad placemaking and development principles: indeed, they represent sound principles for all types of development: ‘masterplanning 101’, if you like.
But building a New Town is a complex process. There is not, nor should there be, a common approach. New Towns are enshrined in their context, and their success depends on factors far broader than the planning and masterplanning structures they were conceived within.
With this in mind, and drawing on both our consultancy and lived experience, we decided to test how the initial Task Force principles might evolve to shape considerations for where, what and how the next generation of New Towns might materialise.
