Under the title "New Towns of the 21st Century", INTI is organizing a worldwide pooling of knowledge and experience related to New Town planning. Why? Because many New Town developments are predictable: they are designed and built in one fell swoop, they are the product of the insights of a particular juncture in time, have large stocks of the same type of housing that will become outdated simultaneously, form part of a regional development and belong to an existing metropolis.
Building a New Town ’from scratch’ is a heroic undertaking that repeatedly challenges the architect or planner to find the ideal form for the urban program of the day. However, it is alarming how many hundreds of New Towns of the 20th century must be regarded as unsuccessful. A great many well-intentioned experiments have turned out to be failures. We now find ourselves once again in an age of urbanization, this time not in Western countries, but primarily in the so-called BRIC countries and other rapidly expanding economies. To steer the migration and economic growth in the right direction, the New Town as a planning instrument is once again becoming popular.
Research and Exchange Program
It is no longer necessary to experiment blindly with all these new projects: we can learn from existing New Towns, provided that opportunities are created whereby a multidisciplinary pooling of knowledge between practice, research and training is possible. With this objective in mind, INTI is putting New Towns back on the agenda for research institutes, educational institutions, urban planners, architects, project developers, and decision-makers in six different cities around the world by means of its New Towns of the 21st Century project. To do this, INTI is searching for cities that are experiencing lightning-fast urbanization as well as cities where the future of existing New Towns is subject to major urban planning issues. The current tasks set an example for other parts of the world.
Shenzhen and Chandigarh
Over a three-year period, a research and exchange program for students and professionals will be established, supported by temporary outposts for several ’researchers in residence’, beginning in Shenzhen (China) and Chandigarh (India) from September 2012 onwards.
More information will follow shortly.
