As I understand it, Penn intended to preserve a permanent open square at the city center. That square is now occupied by City Hall. I guess they decided it was just too valuable not to build on it.
He didn’t really found it, IIRC. There was a reasonably-sized city called Baghdad there years before, but he rebuilt it from the ground up. As for its changed shape nowadays, I suggest you ask Tamerlane…
I beleive it’s Jasper O’Farrell we have to thank for that. Jackass. He’s also the guy who extended the existing grid over all the bigass hills, giving us street grades up to 31% (PDF map).
In the 1960s two landmark planned cities were developed on the East Coast of the U.S.: Reston, Virginia, outside Washington, DC, and Columbia, Maryland, halfway between Baltimore and Washington.
I’ve lived in Columbia for most of the last 36 years. Here are a few of the important principles incorporated into the city by developer Jim Rouse that the Wikipedia article I’ve linked to doesn’t mention:
Neighborhoods on loop roads. To avoid the problem of heavy traffic through residential areas, most neighborhoods are set on a main road that loops back to a larger road, so that drivers don’t pass through the neighborhood to get somewhere else. Within each loop is a neigborhood center with a pool and elementary school that neighborhood kids can walk to without crossing a main artery road.
On this map, the neighborhood of Longfellow is centered on Hesperus Drive, which loops off of Eliot’s Oak Road. Faulkner Ridge Circle loops off Twin Rivers Road, as does Green Mountain Circle, the neighborhoods of Faulkner Ridge and Bryant Woods, respectively.
(Did you notice the literary names? Not an accident. Most street and other place names are based either on literature or historic Howard County land grant names.)
Aesthetics. All power and telephone lines in Columbia are below ground. Roads follow natural countours, not a grid pattern. Billboards are not allowed, and a fairly strict set of covenants restricts business buildings and signs.
Permanent open space. Between the neighborhoods are wooded areas that will never be developed. Paved “bike paths” pass through them, providing enjoyable walks.
Living and working. Columbia was relatively successful in attracting industry and business so that many people could both live and work in the city. To be sure, many Columbians commute to work in DC or Baltimore, but unlike Reston, which is little more than a bedroom community for DC, a fairly large percentage of residents also work in Columbia.
I’m told by a friend who studied urban planning that many of the concepts embodied in Columbia’s design have since become common practice around the world.
I fully believe that - from your description, I realised it was a similar concept that was used here, on a housing development near me.
There were to be 5 parks, the largest being Centre Square, which was also centrally located. City Hall has been occupying Centre Square since the 1870s; it has a open courtyard but you’re right that’s not really the same. The four corner parks are still there, now Rittenhouse, Franklin, Washington and Logan Squares (i.e. Logan Circle as the placement of the Franklin Parkway has now rendered it the center of a traffic circle). I did say “largely as” Penn intended… 
Indeed. And its a very young city, less than a century old, parked on what used to be a paddock.
I know lots of Restonians who work in Reston, as I did up until my office moved last summer. But Reston did fail to build the kind of big office parks and towers that could support post-industrial economies in the 80s and early 90s. There’s big buildings going up everywhere these days, though.
And Reston is a planned community built atop another planned community, the Victorian utopian town of Wiehle.
The OP asked for “major cities” that were planned, and we’ve probably covered every one. But there are a lot of planned small towns built quite recently. For instance, Seaside, Florida (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside%2C_Florida; http://www.seasidefl.com/). Seaside was founded by Robert Davis, who inherited 70 acres (about the size of the average shopping mall) of beachfront land in Walton County in the Florida Panhandle. It was designed by the architectural firm of Duany & Plater-Zyberk (http://www.dpz.com/), who have several other “New Urbanist” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Urbanism) “new town” projects to their credit, including Kentlands, Maryland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentlands).
Seaside differs notably from Columbia, Maryland (discussed above) in that it is designed for walking, not driving. (A feature that may take on increasing relevance as the world gradually runs short of fossil fuels.) House lots are small, with no room for a lawn, and everything is arranged around a number of public squares, including a large central one in the main retail shopping area. Now, Seaside is not really a good proof-of-concept for a new/old model of small-town living, because it is, and was intended to be, a resort town – thus most homeowners are resident there only part of the year. Not a real community. And it is located so far from major population centers that mass transit will never play a role in its life – you can walk around Seaside, but you have to drive to get there. But it has inspired a lot of experiments.
Celebration, Florida (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration%2C_Florida), a Disney project, is also built to a pedestrian scale. In fact, it is very similar to the nearby old town of Kissimmee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kissimmee%2C_Florida), except that everything in Celebration is much, much more expensive. What does it mean when the imitation costs more than the original? That was one of many urban conundra pondered by Alex Marshall in How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0292752407/qid=1135897852/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-8644158-0707916?n=507846&s=books&v=glance – which I recommend highly to anyone interested in these matters.
See also:
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, by Andres Duany (co-designer of Seaside) – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0865476063/ref=pd_sim_b_1/104-8644158-0707916?_encoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155
The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, by Peter Katz – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0070338892/ref=pd_sim_b_3/104-8644158-0707916?_encoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155
A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburb, by Philip Langdon – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0870239147/qid=1135898047/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/104-8644158-0707916?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century, by James Howard Kunstler – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684837374/ref=pd_sim_b_2/104-8644158-0707916?_encoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155
The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream, by Peter Calthorpe – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1878271687/qid=1135898191/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/104-8644158-0707916?s=books&v=glance&n=283155 (Calthorpe is also a noted designer of “new towns” – see his firms website at http://www.calthorpe.com/.)
Sorry, Brad, I didn’t mean to slight Reston. And I have to admit that my comment was based on information from the 1980s. I haven’t been to Reston or read up on its current status in years. So thanks for updating me.
FYI, if you’ve seen The Truman Show, you’ve seen Seaside, Florida. Portions of it were filmed there.
BTW, Peter Calthorpe, the progenitor of the “pedestrian pockets” idea – that the eco-friendly metro area of the future should be a collection of small, walkable communities dotting the countryside, linked together by light-rail lines – is the designer of the new town of Laguna West, in Sacramento County, California (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laguna_West-Lakeside%2C_CA[/url)), which was designed to be served by a light-rail line, but none has yet been built.
Sorry, that link on Laguna West is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laguna_West-Lakeside%2C_CA.
I work in Reston, and I have to say it’s one of the major workplace collections in Northern Virginia (outside Tysons Corner). They have hi-tech office parks all up and down both Sunset Hills and Sunrise Valley. Reston is the heart of the Dulles Technology Corridor, it’s the most happening place in Virginia.
Besides New Delhi, three of the capitals of Indian states created post-independence are also planned cities:
– the partition of Punjab put the historical capital, Lahore, in Pakistan. And East Punjab and several feudal states were further reorganised into the states of Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh. The planned city Chandigarh now serves as the capital of Punjab and Haryana. And because it is the capital of two states, it can be part of neither of them. So it is also effectively the capital of itself.
– the elimination of Bombay State and redrawing of state lines on the western coast of India along linguistic lines resulted in the need for a capital for the new state of Gujarat. For a time, the state’s largest city, Ahmedabad, served as a capital, but a new city, Gandhinagar, was built for the capital.
– the state of Bihar and Orissa was divided and each state was expanded to incoroporate linguistically related areas. A new capital for Orissa, Bhubaneshwar, was built.
The interesting thing about this change is that the view I expressed, which was common in the 1980s, that Columbia had attracted more businesses, and hence more jobs, than Reston, referred at least in part to industrial, blue-collar jobs. Columbia has an industrial sector that includes a large factory that once made GE microwave ovens. I don’t know its status now, but I do know that it has sat idle for long periods of time.
So it is not surprising that Reston has successfully supported growth in white-collar jobs as the US has shifted to a service economy. I believe Columbia has seen growth in this area, too, although I have no special knowledge in the field, except insofar as I am part of the trend: a self-employed newsletter publisher working out of my home.
This is correct for the original city, between South and Girard and river to river, but isn’t even close today. What happened was that the city expanded enormously in the mid 19th century becoming coterminus with the county. At this point it took in some unplanned towns (e.g Germantown), some old cow paths (Baltimore, Chester, Lansdowne, and Lancaster Aves.) and unincorporated farmland that developed without much planning. So unlike, say Manhattan (I won’t even try with Brooklyn and the rest) whose downtown is evidently unplanned but everything else is (ignoring Broadway, at least), in Philadelphia it is the center city that is planned and basically nothing else.
I live in Irvine, California which is full of monopolies because it was all planned by the Irvine Company who owns EVERYTHING. They say it is America’s largest master-planned City. It’s a very safe and pretty place to live but not one for individuals fond of non-conformity and cheap prices. More Information.
If I understand you, I think this is what you are after.
Seaside was already mentioned in Posts #29 and #31.