Abstract
Key Words: New Towns, Neo-Liberal Planning, Production of Space,
New Urban Forms in the 21 Century
The Context: The Presentation is drawing from an ongoing research
project on "Parallel Cities in the South" and develops
results which were presented in the TRIALOG 75 issue: New Settlements.
(The Authors are Editors of the Volume)
In discussing a series of recently built and emerging new town
projects in the south our paper aims to explore the mechanisms of
their production, to evaluate their qualities, and to qualify these
as forms of neo liberal space.
Key Questions: What does neo-liberal space look like? In what (urban)
context does it emerge? Who uses it? What effects does it have?
How does it relate to urban spatial models of the past?
The planning of large city extensions and new towns is once again
at the top of the agenda ? not only in the quickly developing economies
of South East Asia but in many of the mega-cities world-wide, as
the different projects that will be discussed in our contribution
illustrate. The new settlements, with up to several hundred thousand
inhabitants in some cases, are not a mere consequence of increasing
urbanisation, population growth and centralisation, but also an
effect of the respective cities‚ ambitions to become part of
a global network of profitable ‰world cities‰. Besides
the efforts to decentralise, the development approach of most of
the new cities is hence determined by concepts stemming from a neo-liberal
free market economy: de-regularisation of the public sector, privatisation
of planning and administration, big transnational financial corporations
and developers, special economic zones... The visible outcome often
is an internationally standardised ‰generic architecture‰,
consumer-orientated, exclusively targeting the international economy
and the higher income groups. This results in an increasing process
of physical, functional and social segregation and polarisation
between the new and the existing, the formal and the informal city.
It is still an open question whether these new settlements will
be capable of contributing to the solution of today‚s pressing
problems of urbanisation (population growth, urban poverty and segregation,
ecological crisis) or whether they will instead even aggravate the
already existing tensions and negative trends. Among the Cases:
Nordelta (Argentina) ; Saigon South (Vietnam) ;Alphaville (Brazil)
; Kota Visata (Indonesia) ; and others ...
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