Planned new cities have a fairly long history of failures, though there have been some successes, like Almere near Amsterdam.
Townsend, Ontario
Born in the 1970s, the community just under an hour's drive southwest from Hamilton was pitched as an Ontario government-sponsored development that would transform a rural section of Haldimand and Norfolk counties into a "megalopolis" to house hundreds of thousands of people drawn to the area by industrial employers.
Now it's home to fewer than 1,000, said Ramsey, citing data from the 2016 census.
It boasts plenty of parkland and amenities, but not a single store.
UK. Milton Keynes
Not all new towns are the same, but the criticisms levelled at them generally are. They are still looked down upon, derided for their lack of place, their soullessness. Traditional British towns and cities grew organically around certain functions: a church or cathedral, a port, a university, a market, an industry. Their identities and culture accumulated over centuries. Building Rome in a day meant losing all that. You could drive anywhere in Milton Keynes within 15 minutes, planners claimed, but there was nowhere to go. And if you didn’t fancy driving, the car-centric grid plan condemned pedestrians to roaming miles of underpasses in search of civilisation.
Not to pick on Milton Keyes: (UK) Garden villages locking-in car dependency, says report - BBC News
The garden village concept was devised to overcome problems of local resistance to housing estates bolted on to small towns.
The government's prospectus said these should be largely self-sustaining and genuinely mixed-use, with public transport, walking and cycling enabling access to jobs, education and services.
But the report found that:
All settlements but one failed to provide access to amenities with safe walking and cycling routes and a railway station within a mile of all new homes
Residents in one garden village may have to walk up to seven miles to buy a pint of milk
None of the 20 settlements would provide all-week bus services to all households through the day
Cycle routes from the garden villages into nearby towns would often be long and dangerous.
New towns created 50 years ago struggle to remain attractive (French language)
In use, the housing estates duplicated to infinity, these buildings on slabs, these shopping centers that emerged from the ground before the slightest inhabitant can turn out to be disembodied, difficult to renovate, to connect. “The initial error is not starting from a core, from a pre-existing city. Some have no center, are too spread out, poorly connected. They will never be cities! says Pierre-Marie Tricaud, project manager at IAU-IDF.
Another puzzle, the quality of the buildings and their simultaneous construction. “Twenty of my 59 schools must be rehabilitated at the same time,” says Stéphane Beaudet. “The question that will arise in the future is how to live there on foot? also points out Pierre-Marie Tricaud. The improvement of public transport focuses expectations.
Egypt's new capital: who gains?
And the military is not only “paying” for the project. It will also reap enormous financial benefits from this ambitious endeavour. The ACUD, in which the military has the majority stake, is in charge of selling housing units in the new capital. Moreover, the company is also responsible for selling or operating the buildings in Cairo that will be vacated after agencies, ministries and embassies move to their new locations. Some of these buildings are in the very heart of Cairo, overlooking Tahrir Square, and have significant value.
Besides, to a large extent, de-facto suburbanization of the countryside next to big cities is a form of new cities.
Why should Canada, which has pretty unique constraints in its land use (most cities are as South-positioned as possible) follow this? It would be a major policy change, but would it be good one?
There is one extra bit of British Columbia specificity to point out here, which is the Agricultural Land Reserve:
Basically, you can't convert from farmland without special permission, which is, supposedly, only granted when you convert an equivalent surface to farmland elsewhere.
Some other province have similar? regulations.
What is actually being done?
Vancouver, maybe, seems set to follow California's example and de-zone single-family only housing. (Personal opinion: about time!)
They cite Journal of the American Planning Association
Local planning in the United States is unique in the amount of land it reserves for detached single-family homes. This privileging of single-family homes, normally called R1 zoning, exacerbates inequality and undermines efficiency. R1’s origins are unpleasant: Stained by explicitly classist and implicitly racist motivations, R1 today continues to promote exclusion. It makes it harder for people to access high-opportunity places, and in expensive regions it contributes to shortages of housing, thereby benefiting homeowners at the expense of renters and forcing many housing consumers to spend more on housing.
(yes, this is wrt USA, but Canadian urban land use is quite similar)
Also, from SDH ZONING AND LAND USE
35% of all households live on single family and duplex properties making up 81% of Vancouver’s residential land, while the remaining 65% of households live on 19% of the residential land.
p.s. I used to live near Paris before moving to Canada and the "villes nouvelles" there generally weren't considered as that brilliant a government endeavor.
