Chapter 5, “Consulting,” follows public sector planners as they exported their experience around the world. If familiar accounts of 1970s Britain depict a sclerotic economy and polity, this episode attests to an entrepreneurial social democracy; and if conventional readings of these new towns depict them as quintessentially English, this episode reveals the international horizons of British new town planning. The story begins in 1976, when the UN’s Habitat conference recommended that states develop “spatial strategy plans” to manage urban growth, endorsing public sector planning programs that echoed Britain’s new towns. Milton Keynes Development Corporation took the lead in marketing British expertise to states around the world, including Nigeria, Egypt, Thailand, Venezuela, Trinidad & Tobago, and Algeria. Although this outreach promised to open markets to British firms, the Conservative government abruptly terminated these efforts in 1982. Henceforth, British urban planners continued to market their expertise as a model for the world, but in terms that now embraced the priorities of market liberalism.

Chapter 6, “Housing,” argues that the property-owning social democracy offered an alternative to Conservative housing policy. If the Conservative dream of a “property-owning democracy” envisioned a nation of homeowners, the property-owning social democracy sought economic, social, and spatial balance within a mixed housing system. This vision imagined not a universal public sector, but a dual tenurial system, including private owners alongside public renters. There was no “natural” state of housing: both the expansion of municipal housing after 1945, and the rise in owner-occupation after 1980, represented state achievements. Milton Keynes Development Corporation had always valued owner-occupation, but from 1976 that policy became a priority when spending cuts and policy shifts threatened the new town’s realization. MKDC began to prioritize housing sales, achieving such success that, by 1979, they could cast themselves as partners to the Conservative government. In time, however, this emphasis on private housing compromised the corporation’s ability to ensure balance across the city, producing patterns of socio-spatial polarization that foreshadowed national problems to come.

Chapter 1, “Horizons,” recovers the vanquished plan that preceded Milton Keynes, North Bucks New City. In the early 1960s, Buckinghamshire county council’s chief architect and planner, Fred Pooley, peered into the future. Like other planners at the time, he foresaw a post-industrial world of affluence, leisure, and new mobilities, if also one still organized around familiar gender roles and urban forms. Pooley designed a city for a quarter-million residents, with a monorail ensuring free and equal access to the city center. This social democratic vision sought to use the powers of the state to distribute the benefits of affluence. Pooley also wanted North Bucks New City to send a message to the world, expressing a nationalist urbanism that promised to secure Britain’s post-imperial status as an urban innovator. While the new town that eventually emerged, in the form of Milton Keynes, rejected Pooley’s monorail, its location – indeed, its existence – resulted from a contested process that cannot be understood without attending to this unrealized vision.

Why, before selling council houses or denationalizing public industries, did Margaret Thatcher’s government begin to privatize Britain’s new towns? Thatcher’s Progress argues that the new towns represented the spatial dimension of the welfare state. Britain’s new towns program developed out of the garden city tradition, an approach to town and country planning that, during the early twentieth century, spread throughout the world. In the New Towns Act of 1946, the Labour government nationalized this dimension of town planning, leading to the designation of thirty-two new towns within a quarter century. This book focuses upon the most ambitious of these projects, Milton Keynes,in order to recast our understandings of social democracy and market liberalism. Rather than depicting social democracy as exhausted by the 1970s, the making of Milton Keynes reveals dynamic social democrats responding creatiely to changing times. And rather than locating the origins of market liberalism ever deeper in postwar history, this project illustrates the non-deterministic, but ultimately decisive, process through which market liberalism triumphed.

Chapter 2, “Planning,” examines a consequential moment in urban history, after Jane Jacobs but before OPEC. The question of the future city animated the 1967 competition to plan the most significant project in the world’s leading new towns program, Milton Keynes. Yet the plan that resulted attracted criticism for its banality, and so this chapter recovers the ideas that motivated the city’s planning in order to re-enchant The Plan for Milton Keynes (1970). The story features three characters: the chairman, Jock Campbell, a sixth-generation sugar magnate whose anti-communist campaigns in British Guiana left him wary of grand designs; the planner, Richard Llewelyn-Davies, a welfare state architect-planner whose plan for Milton Keynes propelled him into a thriving global practice; and the visionary, Melvin Webber, an American urban futurist who paradoxically persuaded the new town’s makers that the future could not be known. Together with their colleagues, these figures dared to reimagine both the city and the future, but their refusal of bold designs left a void which eventually became filled by roundabouts and concrete cows.

Chapter 3, “Architecture,” offers a historical explanation of aesthetic change. Commentators agree that architectural modernism had crested by 1980. But how could far-flung actors more-or-less simultaneously come to prefer, say, pitched roofs over flat ones? Rather than assuming that modernism’s end was natural or inevitable, this chapter recovers the process by which one set of forms displaced another. The analysis toggles between a macro account introducing the concept of welfare state modernism, and a micro account examining its fate in Milton Keynes. From the early 1970s, a new generation of architects arrived eager to renew their modernist inheritance. At the same time, building societies conveyed reluctance about offering mortgages to non-traditional houses. Since this policy threatened the corporation’s ability to sell its housing, a faction engineered a survey to undermine modernist features. By altering the criteria against which housing was judged, this survey resulted in instructions to future architects to design in neo-traditional styles. In this way, a public sector body born of the welfare state became enlisted in the project of eliminating welfare state modernism.

The conclusion underscores the many ways that new town planning illustrated a dynamic social democracy. Yet these responses to the 1970s yielded unintended consequences, as strategic accommodations of individualism, markets, and private finance became ends unto themselves. If market liberalism initially figured as but one response to emergent priorities and constraints after 1973, Thatcherism represented the subordination of those more various possibilities to a market logic. By the 1990s, in order to distance itself from left as well as right, New Labour endorsed a reading of postwar history as having been dominated by the state and then the market on either side of 1979. This erasure of social democracy’s more supple history requires its recovery – the recovery of ambitions and innovations that, however imperfectly enacted, remain visible all around us in new towns housing millions. Today, as cities around the world face dramatic housing crises, the history of new town planning attests to precedents and procedures that states recently deployed in their efforts to confront these recurrent urban challenges.

Chapter 4, “Community,” examines competing approaches to community development. Since the 1920s, planners had believed that spaces forged social ties; but from the 1960s, this approach was challenged by the view that communities came from people. Milton Keynes offered a showcase for this “people-ist” conviction. Its social development department sought to forestall the “new town blues,” by stimulating residents’ efforts to build communities. These initiatives nourished a rich associational life centered around women and their families. But when some estates encountered problems with their housing, their inhabitants demanded redress, while other residents later organized to challenge the corporation politically. Facing these more assertive forms of community, figures within the corporation reconsidered their commitment to social development, even questioning whether an entity called the “people” existed at all. From one perspective, this retreat affirms the triumph of an individualism associated with market liberalism – but from the residents’ perspective, this same episode becomes a story of social democratic subjects, mindful of their rights and collectively asserting them.