Chapter 6, “Housing,” argues that the property-owning social democracy offered an alternative to Conservative housing policy. If the Conservative dream of a “property-owning democracy” envisioned a nation of homeowners, the property-owning social democracy sought economic, social, and spatial balance within a mixed housing system. This vision imagined not a universal public sector, but a dual tenurial system, including private owners alongside public renters. There was no “natural” state of housing: both the expansion of municipal housing after 1945, and the rise in owner-occupation after 1980, represented state achievements. Milton Keynes Development Corporation had always valued owner-occupation, but from 1976 that policy became a priority when spending cuts and policy shifts threatened the new town’s realization. MKDC began to prioritize housing sales, achieving such success that, by 1979, they could cast themselves as partners to the Conservative government. In time, however, this emphasis on private housing compromised the corporation’s ability to ensure balance across the city, producing patterns of socio-spatial polarization that foreshadowed national problems to come.

Chapter 3, “Architecture,” offers a historical explanation of aesthetic change. Commentators agree that architectural modernism had crested by 1980. But how could far-flung actors more-or-less simultaneously come to prefer, say, pitched roofs over flat ones? Rather than assuming that modernism’s end was natural or inevitable, this chapter recovers the process by which one set of forms displaced another. The analysis toggles between a macro account introducing the concept of welfare state modernism, and a micro account examining its fate in Milton Keynes. From the early 1970s, a new generation of architects arrived eager to renew their modernist inheritance. At the same time, building societies conveyed reluctance about offering mortgages to non-traditional houses. Since this policy threatened the corporation’s ability to sell its housing, a faction engineered a survey to undermine modernist features. By altering the criteria against which housing was judged, this survey resulted in instructions to future architects to design in neo-traditional styles. In this way, a public sector body born of the welfare state became enlisted in the project of eliminating welfare state modernism.

The conclusion underscores the many ways that new town planning illustrated a dynamic social democracy. Yet these responses to the 1970s yielded unintended consequences, as strategic accommodations of individualism, markets, and private finance became ends unto themselves. If market liberalism initially figured as but one response to emergent priorities and constraints after 1973, Thatcherism represented the subordination of those more various possibilities to a market logic. By the 1990s, in order to distance itself from left as well as right, New Labour endorsed a reading of postwar history as having been dominated by the state and then the market on either side of 1979. This erasure of social democracy’s more supple history requires its recovery – the recovery of ambitions and innovations that, however imperfectly enacted, remain visible all around us in new towns housing millions. Today, as cities around the world face dramatic housing crises, the history of new town planning attests to precedents and procedures that states recently deployed in their efforts to confront these recurrent urban challenges.