Are New Towns the Answer for Housing Affordability and City Livability?
- Michael Mehaffy
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
Planned or unplanned, a new generation of urbanization around the globe is under way. What are the lessons from history?
ABOVE: An aerial view of the proposed California Forever development, also known as the Suisun Expansion of the existing Suisun City. Image by California Forever.
SOLANO COUNTY, CALIFORNIA USA - The idea of building “new towns” to solve housing shortages and improve urban livability is not new. From the Garden Cities of Ebenezer Howard to modernist experiments like Brasília and Chandigarh, planners have repeatedly turned to large-scale, purpose-built settlements as solutions to urban problems.
The results, however, have been mixed at best. Many new towns have failed to deliver on their promises, producing car-dependent environments, economic monocultures, or socially fragmented places that lack the complexity of real urban life. In some cases, they have reproduced the very problems they were meant to solve. Skepticism is therefore well warranted.
On the other hand, many (if not most) of the most successful and well-loved cities and parts of cities started as new planned settlements. There are ample lessons from history about the processes that made those new settlements successful - and processes that made them regrettable. We now have a deeper understanding of the importance of what Jane Jacobs called "organized complexity," and the need for diversity, walkability, and mixed-use development. At the same time, we now face enormous new pressures: rising land and housing costs, a mismatch of housing types to needs, climate threats, health impacts, and rapid global urbanization.
The question is no longer whether new towns, or new urban extensions of towns, are inherently good or bad. Whether we favor it or not, urbanization is happening around the globe -- sometimes at breathtaking speeds, especially in the Global South. The question now is whether these new settlements can be conceived, governed, and implemented in ways that overcome the structural distortions that have undermined past efforts.
Three contemporary scenarios, in different parts of the world with very different contexts, help illuminate this challenge:
A major new town proposal in California;
Ongoing UK efforts around Garden Cities and urban extensions;
The rapid growth of cities, particularly their informal settlements, across the Global South.
Together, these three examples of urbanization offer a revealing case study of the opportunities and dangers of today's urban expansions.
1. California Forever: A New Urbanist Test Case?
One of the most prominent current proposals is California Forever, a privately financed plan to build a new city of up to 400,000 residents in Solano County, USA. Positioned as a response to California’s housing crisis, it proposes something largely absent from recent
U.S. development -- unlike, say, China or other parts of the world: an entire walkable, mixed-use city built at metropolitan scale.
Notably, the proposal has drawn support from figures within the New Urbanist movement. Steve Mouzon, a speaker at the upcoming IMCL conference this July, has argued that the project aligns with principles of “The Original Green,” emphasizing enduring, place-based sustainability rooted in traditional urban form. Unlike many large-scale proposals, he suggests, California Forever holds up not only in concept but at the level of streets, blocks, and daily life.
In particular, Mouzon highlights several features that will be familiar to IMCL audiences:
A fine-grained street network, including a hierarchical grid reminiscent of 19th-century urbanism;
A prioritization of walkability and human-scale design;
A stated emphasis on “quality of life” over sheer economic throughput or consumption;
A consistency between stated goals and the physical planning framework—something he notes is rare in contemporary large-scale developments.
One of the persistent criticisms of New Urbanism (and other projects aimed at walkable mixed use) is that such projects are limited and boutique in character -- and that reality, coupled with their very popularity, makes them unaffordable "luxury goods". California Forever could therefore represent an important test: whether principles of walkable, human-scaled urbanism can be applied at larger scales -- including the scales that many believe will be required to address contemporary housing challenges of affordability and livability.
However, there are reasons for caution. The scale and governance model raise questions about accountability and long-term public oversight. Environmental constraints—including water supply and ecological impacts—are significant in a region already under stress. And as with many new towns, the greatest risk lies in the gap between plan and implementation: financing, phasing, and market pressures can easily erode even the strongest initial framework.
A further concern lies in the design character of some of the buildings in the renderings. Many lean toward a contemporary minimalist aesthetic, raising issues not of stylistic preference but of geometric and morphological quality. a topic we have examined in IMCL conferences, particularly in light of new research in environmental psychology, neuroscience, and neuroaesthetics. It suggests that the most successful environments—those supporting walkability, economic vitality, and human well-being—exhibit rich levels of ordered complexity, scaling hierarchy, and ornamentation. By contrast, simplified and visually shallow environments have often proven less resilient over time. Indeed, many once-fashionable modernist environments have aged poorly and, in some cases, been demolished. From a sustainability perspective, environments that fail to sustain long-term human attachment are unlikely to endure.
Yet the stated motivations for the project are compelling. California has a severe shortage of walkable, moderately dense, affordable urban environments, and the demand for these places drives up their cost. In that context, a large-scale supply intervention, including more housing for lower- and middle-income residents, becomes persuasive to many.
As Mouzon and others argue, California Forever may represent one of the most serious and promising attempts in decades to apply sound urban principles at scale. There is also the danger that it will repeat familiar mistakes of overreach and under-delivery. In that sense, it is a stunningly ambitious test of whether we have learned enough from past failures to do better.
ABOVE: THe Suisun Expansion shows a fine-grained plot and block structure, supporting mixed use and walkability, and accommodating "middle housing" at a range of prices. Image by California Forever.
2. UK Garden Cities and Urban Extensions: Housing vs. Places
In the United Kingdom, the response has taken a different form. Rather than focusing on new settlements, current efforts emphasize urban extensions and updated Garden City models, expanding existing towns in more integrated ways. This approach reflects an important shift: building on and extending existing infrastructure and communities rather than starting from scratch.
A key advocate for this approach has been the The King’s Foundation, a long-time partner of the IMCL. Ben Bolgar, its Director of Projects, will also be contributing to upcoming IMCL discussions at the Latvia conference this July. Their work emphasizes not just housing delivery, but the creation of complete, walkable communities, typified by Poundbury (left) and other "urban extensions".
The Foundation makes a critical distinction between delivering “housing” and delivering “places.” Despite widespread agreement on the value of mixed-use, walkable environments, most development continues to produce large-scale, single-use housing estates—car-dependent, lacking services, and limited in long-term sustainability.
The reason for this persistence has less to do with a lack of design knowledge, and more to do with economic incentive structures: economies of scale, impatient capital, and regulatory comlpexities, among other barriers.
Volume housebuilders operate within systems that rewards scale and standardization. Financing, valuation, and risk frameworks favor predictable cookie-cutter residential products over more complex, diverse, mixed-use environments. As a result, even well-intentioned plans are often simplified in delivery. This amounts to a persistent structural misalignment between what we know produces livable places and what the system delivers.
Efforts by the King’s Foundation aim to address this through design guidance, demonstration projects, and advocacy for systemic reform. But the UK experience underscores a key lesson: the challenge is not simply to design better places, but to create the conditions under which they can and will be built.
Urban extensions do offer a more context-sensitive alternative to new towns, as the failed examples of new towns in the UK demonstrate. But their competitive disadvantages also highlight a broader need: for systemic reforms of the economic and institutional drivers, to make these places just as attractive on price as well as quality.
3. Informal Settlements: The Realities of Global Urbanization
In much of the Global South, “new towns” are not master-planned projects, but informal settlements, often disparagingly referred to as slums. Indeed, they can be woefully short of adequate infrastructure, services, and public spaces, they can be unsanitary and unsafe. Yet even today, they are often the dominant mode of urbanization in many regions. More to the point, they exhibit dynamics of urbanization that are as old as cities themselves.
The issue goes the the fundamental question of why we make cities at all, and why we want to live in them. The reality is that urbanization is one of the most powerful drivers of human development, associated with improved incomes, health, education, and expanded opportunities—particularly for women and disadvantaged populations. It's not surprising then, that for all their problems, these informal settlements are attractive to many rural residents looking for a better life in the city.
The question, then, is not whether informal urbanization should occur, but how it can be supported and improved. As Solly Angel of New York University has noted -- and has applied to his work with The King's Foundation and others -- we will need to better understand, and respect, the processes of self-organization that occur in informal settlements, and steer them toward better human outcomes. Often this means finding simple, understandable ways of creating better urban patterns (like street patterns) proactively, rather than trying to retrofit them reactively. It's less about trying to force a top-down approach -- or for that matter, taking a laissez-faire bottom-up approach -- and more about finding an optimum combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches.
In this context, the IMCL network, in partnership with UN-Habitat and Sustasis Foundation, is developing work on “local patterns for implementing the New Urban Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals.” The goal is to translate global frameworks into practical local tools that guide local decisions, about the layout and maintenance of streets, public spaces, private plots, and infrastructure—in ways that are adaptable, understandable, and capable of supporting incremental improvement.
In informal settlements, this approach is especially promising. Rather than wholesale clearance, it supports upgrading, gradual densification, and the introduction of services, while preserving existing natural assets and social structures.
Asking The Real Question
The question, then, is not whether new urbanization is happening - it unquestionably is, and will almost certainly continue -- but how it can be made safe, healthy, equitable, ecological -- in a word, livable.
California Forever shows us the potential, and the risks too, of large-scale, principle-driven development. The UK experience reveals the systemic barriers that prevent the delivery of complete communities. And informal settlements demonstrate that urbanization is an ongoing, self-organizing process that must be engaged, not replaced.
This does not mean that we should neglect infill, redevelopment, and the repair of existing urban fabric. There is enormous value in leveraging existing infrastructure, strengthening existing communities, and achieving environmental benefits by reducing urban footprints. Yet these areas of development remain difficult because they often contain some of the most entrenched barriers.
New towns and urban extensions can in some respects offer pathways around those barriers -- not only providing needed homes and services, but serving as test beds for innovative new approaches, possibly useful for both new and old settlements. But they require their own forms of systemic change, without which they only risk reproducing familiar problems in new locations.
The real opportunity lies in simplified, user-friendly frameworks that can operate across contexts: shaping new developments, guiding urban extensions, and supporting the evolution of informal settlements, as well as infill development. (We are very encouraged about the potential of pattern languages to serve as these framework tools - to be discussed further at the upcoming IMCL conference.)
The question, then, is not whether new towns and urban extensions into greenfields are the answer. For better or worse, they are happening around the globe. The real question is whether we are prepared to realign our systems of urban growth and revitalization with what we already know, and have learned from history. That is the enormous remaining challenge ahead.
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The 63rd International Making Cities Livable, July 6-10 in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia, will examine these and other questions.