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Political Participation in New Towns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Michael A. Baer
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From Ebenezer Howard's turn-of-the-century concept of garden cities ‘new towns’ have evolved. The growth of new towns is not a fad. The first British new town, founded by Howard and planned by architects Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker in 1903, was Letchworth. There has been a steady increase in the establishment of new towns in several countries since, and proposals for many more in the future. In Britain, twenty-nine towns were designated between November 1946 and July 1973. The final projected populations of the New Towns range from 13,000 in Mid-Wales to 420,000 in Central Lancashire New Town. Most have final projected populations in the 60,000–120,000 range. In the United States, the National Commission on Urban Growth, composed of U.S. Senators, Representatives, Governors, Mayors and County Commissioners, proposed that at least 110 new American cities be developed, with the aid of federal funding. And at a recent meeting of the International Association of Housing Science representatives of the Association's forty member countries were told that worldwide housing demands in the next thirty years will require the creation of 3,500 new cities.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , April 1978 , pp. 237 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

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11 Samples of 300 were drawn from the February 1975 electoral register for Basildon and Bracknell; of 303 for Milton Keynes. The response rates were 44 per cent, 45 per cent, and 39 per cent respectively. The sample data was matched with 1971 population census data to check representatives of the sample. Data on sex, marital status and age indicated that the respondents were indeed representative of the population.

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13 Comments made by Myron J. Aronoff, Tel Aviv University, and Peter Kloos, University of Leiden at a session on New Communities at the 34th Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, Amsterdam, 1975.

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20 United Kingdom national sample from the Five Nation Study. This data was made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. The Consortium bears no responsibility for either the analyses or interpretations presented here.

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22 Since more than a decade of relatively rapid inflation exists between the last Butler and Stokes survey and the collection of New Town data, comparative income categories could not rely on equivalent earnings expressed in pounds. Rather it was decided that the sample from each study would be split into categories of approximate equal proportions. The categories, A, B, C and D contain approximately 13 per cent, 40 per cent, 35 per cent, 12 per cent of each sample, with some variation due to coding schemes employed in the original studies.

23 Members of four or more organizations were coded into one category for the Almond and Verba study. We treated these respondents as though they belonged to four organizations. We also treated New Town residents who belonged to more than four organizations as belonging only to four.

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