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New garden cities - old mistakes?
In the third part of his features mini-series GLYN ROBBINS examines the idealistic history of 'social cities' - and how modern versions struggle by being shackled to 'the market'

Marxist geographer David Harvey describes the history of urban policy as "fraught with utopian dreams."

From Robert Owen's New Lanark and model industrial villages like Port Sunlight and Bournville, to Georges Eugene Haussmann's Paris, Ildefons Cerda's Barcelona and Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, there's a long history of attempts to build the ideal place.

In Britain the most ambitious effort to rethink and redesign urban settlement was the post-war "new towns" programme.

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