Are there any major cities today that have been planned from the ground up? If so, were they built for any special purpose (i.e., manufacturing centers, administration, so on)?
Washington, D.C., Canberra, and Brasilia were all planned cities (and all were built for the special purpose of administration, of course).
I think Brazilia, capital of Brazil, qualifies: It was plopped in the middle of the jungle and laid out according to a master design.
Washington, DC, was plopped in the middle of a swamp (IIRC) and laid out according to a master design, as well.
I don’t know how planned midtown Manhattan’s Big Giant Grid was, but it certainly looks like it was laid out with a t-square and a piece of grid paper.
I think the Soviets had a Space City in the middle of Siberia that was more-or-less devoted to the Soviet space program. I could be wrong, however.
The city of Washington, D.C. was effectively planned from the ground up. When the District of Columbia was officially created it was mostly uninhabited. The Virginia section of the District did contain Alexandria, but that part of the District was eventually given back to the Commonwealth of Virginia and the land ceded for the district by Maryland comprises DC today.
The city of Washington’s street plan was almost entirely laid out by Pierre L’Enfant, there was a great deal of planning done by L’Enfant, and to a large degree that is still reflected today (as much, I think, as any plan cooked up 200 years ago before 550,000 people moved into the area can be reflected.)
The city was obviously built for a special purpose, a place to house the permanent capital of the U.S. Federal government.
Philadelphia was also planned in a fairly utopian manner by William Penn. There is a strict grid system he developed, focusing on a center where he intended all of the town’s major pulic buidings to be located.
He intended Philadelphia to be a sprawling, yet green, city. And while some of his ideas were’t workable the city could still probably be considered a planned city.
Ah, thanks for the answers.
On the note of planned cities, are there people who actually LEARN how to only design cities from scratch? Or is it basically a bunch of architects brought together who say, “This might be nice”?
Big list of planned towns and cities
Urban planning is certainly an academic study in its own right. I don’t think there’s enough difference between planning a whole conurbation as opposed to adding a major development to an existing one, nor enough demand for it nowadays, for it to be separated.
Oh, and of course the general Wikipedia article is also full of detail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_town
A lot of schools offer degrees with focuses on urban planning, or urban management and such.
Most of the people who planned earlier cities came from various backgrounds, and often it was a committee of people. In the case of many American cities it was engineers, architects, and suveyors much of the time, but people with no real professional credentials did it as well (William Penn.)
The plan of Brasilia was based on the ideas of Le Corbusier.
Chandigarh, India. One of the things the Brits left behind.
Also, isn’t Manchester Center also one?
Is not true. My SO majored in urban planning and design.
Maybe I wasn’t clear - I wasn’t saying that urban planning wasn’t studied in its own right, only that the creation of entire cities wasn’t studied in isolation (in response to Martin Hyde’s question). If I’m wrong on this, then it’s me who’s misunderstood you 
Not really a functioning city, but we’ll always have Arcosanti…
Nope, I misunderstood. So sorry!
Savannah, Georgia, was planned by James Oglethorpe, based on a regular grid of streets and park squares.
New Delhi, India (essentially a suburb of the old Mughal capital of Delhi), was planned by the British as a government center.
Milton Keynes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Keynes#Milton_Keynes_in_popular_culture) is a planned town in England. In Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s novel Good Omens, the demon Crowley and the angel Azriphale, to make their own jobs easier (and without their superiors’ knowledge), reach some territorial accommodations regarding their local influence. Crowley gets Manchester, Azriphale gets the whole of Shropshire. “No one was sure who was responsible for Milton Keynes, but they both took credit for it anyway.”
If we look to ancient history: When the Greeks were spreading out through the Mediterranean and founding colony-cities, many of them were laid out in a regular grid according to the city-planning theories of Hippodamus of Miletus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippodamus). That included the Hellenistic colonies, such as Alexandria-by-Egypt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria).
Rome itself was a rabbit-warren of streets and lanes based on old cowpaths, etc., that had grown up gradually over centuries. But every colony-town in the Roman Republic and Empire was based on an orderly plan. See David Macaulay’s City (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0395349222/qid=1135797386/sr=8-4/ref=pd_bbs_4/102-5138487-7904936?n=507846&s=books&v=glance).
Caliph al-Mansur founded Baghdad on a circular plan, with the palace at its center. (What happened to that I don’t know; modern Baghdad does not seem to have that shape.)
Many Chinese capitals (including Chang’an and Beijing) were built on an incredibly vast (for the time) grid plan centered on the imperial palace. As was the Chinese-inspired Japanese capital of Kyoto.
Beat me to it… let me add that there’s periodic spacing in the grid system that forms what’s now known as Center City which was supposed to retard major fires from spreading as Penn saw in London in the 17th century. It’s worked.
Also large parts of the city later expanded beyond the grid system and no longer neatly mesh with it. But the parts most visitors see as largely as Penn indtended.
Chicago was planned after it burnt in the Great Chicago Fire. It is a perfectly planned grid, which is a little boring, but extremely impressive from the air. (Especially because almost all of the surrounding suburbs follow the plan, so the grid is very large.) The 0/0 point of the grid is the intersection of State and Madison, downtown. El stations have their points on the grid written out on their signs, which is very helpful to the terminally lost, like myself.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, when San Francisco was destroyed, there was talk of rebuilding it according to a careful plan, but unfortunately it ended up being rebuilt pretty much the same as before, leaving us with the weird layout we have today. (Most of the city is built on two grids, which run at about a 45 degree angle to each other. There are some truly exciting intersections at Market St., where the grids meet.)
The planning for Canberra (the capital of Australia) was the work of American architects Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony. The lake in the centre of Canberra is named Lake Burley Griffin in commemoration.
It would have been more elaborate and complicated if Daniel Burnham could have gotten past the funding/political obstacles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Burnham#City_Planning_.26_the_Plan_of_Chicago
Christopher Wren had an elegant Baroque plan for rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666, which was never executed because that would have required ignoring existing property lines. Map of his plan here: Christopher Wren's Plan for the rebuilding of London You can read the story in The City in Mind by James Howard Kunstler (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000C2W6A/qid=1135807304/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-5138487-7904936?n=507846&s=books&v=glance).