Guy Ortolano

It is *painful* reading these amazing plans for a monorail, serious public transit to allow spaces without cars and give the average person total mobility over the space, and then it's just "yeah those plans got junked" and suddenly some rich consultant from an upper class background who was friends with the ministers in charge gets the brief and he's talking complete nonsense about how having to travel 25 miles to the cinema by car is Freedom and how you shouldn't really plan anything properly because spontaneous development or whatever and how everything needs to be spread out and then he obviously plans this horrible car centric nightmare. The book doesn't touch on things like traffic planning which is a shame (but understandable) but god the absolute nonsense these people came out with to justify their stupid Los Angeles plan that was immediately proven idiotic by the oil crisis of 1973...

Overall a really fascinating book that I recommend if you have any interest in urban planning or UK housing policy postwar. It doesn't cover everything about Milton Keynes but focuses primarily on Milton Keynes Development Corporation, looking at how it started, how they planned the city, how they saw themselves as an intermediary between government and people, how they saw themselves internationally and acted as exporters of urban planning knowledge, how they looked at creating a community, the changes in housing policy... it's really good… (mehr)