Milton Keynes is one of the most famed planned cities of its time. Clean, rational, modern, stripped of artifice and ornament, types of businesses bunched, wide streets fit for the coming car age.
By most standards, it has been a qualified success. Over the last decade or so, however, the mentality of the builders has been increasingly attacked. What looked good to them a half century ago is not what urban planners - or most ordinary citizens - consider to be good today. That’s the overwhelmingly huge problem with planned cities; they are not easily updated.
Milton Keyes - the Soulless City is typical of critiques.
But the city itself is, to me, infinitely depressing, not least because it offers such a window into the minds of our post-1945 politicians, bureaucrats, and architects—rationalist social planners to a man (rarely a woman). Milton Keynes is a kind of laboratory for raising humans in social petri dishes.
Like Brasilia, Milton Keynes was built at the apogee of the automobile as the symbol of wealth, progress, and individual freedom. Pedestrianism at the time was regarded by its planners with about as much respect or interest as astrology or necromancy. Cars embodied the future—dynamic and unstoppable—while human legs belonged to the past. Every adult, it was assumed, would own a car and drive everywhere for every need. Public transport would exist, but only as a vestigial remnant, like an organ that the body no longer requires. …
Here is housing designed by bureaucrats, sociologists, and their ilk—those who, through careful research, have determined what the good life (for others, not themselves) should consist of: a precise number of square feet per inhabitant, a calculated volume of air, a prescribed number of radiators. What cannot be quantified or entered into a spreadsheet simply does not exist in their view, and therefore no criticism on merely aesthetic grounds could matter.
As for those underpasses:
For a pedestrian to cross at intersections of the grid-pattern roads, he must take underpasses, seemingly designed for the encouragement of muggings and rape after dark; but judging by daytime frequentation, I doubt that many would venture there at night, even if they had some reason to do so. Crime in Milton Keynes is somewhat above the national average, but its population is younger, so perhaps this is not unexpected. One in ten people reported being a crime victim in 2023, and one in 30 of a violent crime. Given the inefficacy of the police—solving 21 of 337 burglaries, five of 360 thefts, and so on—it is striking that only a tenth of the population were victims.
Many people, even that article’s writer, find much to praise in Milton Keynes. Especially if you have a car and can drive to the big box stores that are destroying the corner shops. The parks are nice, and plenty of bike lanes exist. There are certainly many British cities that are far worse. Better to be 50 years old than 250.
Cities are organic structures as much as forests and woodlands are. They are best when grown bottom up and not planned from the top down. They should constantly grow, evolve to meet new times and new ways, and find links between their varied parts. Few in the 21st century world meet this standard. Even the glistening skyscrapers of the new Asian cities will look dull and worn in a half century’s time. Retrofitting skyscrapers has had almost zero success, and nobody sees a fix for this. Almost all planned cities feature huge skyscrapers that are presumably more efficient in making all services accessible, still on the King Gillette model. Milton Keynes banned all buildings over six stories, which gives it a human scale that fit into the European attitude that was fiercely against the American-build-upward obsession. That alone is a plus. It’s turn into an American-style suburbia is not.
