Success and Failure of New Cities as Drivers of Urban Growth

Ryser, Judith and Franchini, Teresa (2025) Success and Failure of New Cities as Drivers of Urban Growth. URBAN INNOVATION: TO BOLDLY GO WHERE NO CITIES HAVE GONE BEFORE. Medium sized cities and towns as a major arena of global urbanisation. Proceedings of REAL CORP 2025, 30th Intl. Conference on Urban Development, Regional Planning and Information Society. pp. 849-860. ISSN 2521-3938

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Abstract

This paper builds on the findings of our REAL CORP 2024 paper: “Sustainable, Smart and Humane Cities: from utopia to reality. On the purpose and meaning of urban planning today: lessons from the New Cities”. Based on publicly available data, we found some 80 new settlements, loosely defined as „New Cities” (NC), planned and/or under development. Most of them took place in fast urbanising Asia and Africa, fewer in South America, North America, Russia, and none in Europe, likely due to the smaller scale of its urban settlements and its own tradition of new towns. Our analysis found five categories of NC depending on their key drivers: creating new seats of government (national and regional capital NC); stimulating and transforming national economies (productive NC); global corporate wealth seeking new lucrative investment opportunities (real estate NC); companies accommodating themselves (business NC) and satisfying ecological and social needs (green NC). International design consultancies seeking commissions of masterplans, combining ecocity and smart city design principles into increasingly futuristic images – are also an important part of NC drivers. Studying the implementation progress of NC was more difficult. Although NC aimed at rapid development many of them did not progress quickly and some stalled altogether. Often kick-started by the public sector with investment in infrastructure, relaxed regulations and availability of cheap land, a first phase took place. However, subsequent development expected to be provided by private investment slowed down or stopped altogether, leading sometimes to ghost towns. Despite their often idealistic objectives, NC were accommodating the growing local middle class, excluding the low income population, and sometimes specific ethnic or religious groups. In some cases, smart technology was used for surveillance of inhabitants' activities. After our initial review and analysis of the NC phenomenon, we aimed to understand the dynamic of these settlements better. We refrained from dwelling on the concept of “New City”, as it amounts de facto to a very broad typology of urban settlements at diverse scales, mainly in developing countries, and in particular those with dynamic economies. Thus we focused on whether and how these NC-tagged settlements progressed over time. We found that information in the public domain on emerging NC, embellished by starchitect generated images in pursuit of meeting client demands and attracting private investors was abundant, but their development tended to diverge from real-time progress. We opted to use information from Google Earth images to detect the current situation of the NCs on the ground. This method enabled us both to locate them in their physical context – not always an easy task – and to approximate the degree of compliance of NC realisations with their initial intention over time.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	urbanisation, population growth, new cities, urban growth, case studies
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor T Technology > TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General)
Depositing User:	The CORP Team
Date Deposited:	26 May 2025 13:15
Last Modified:	07 Jul 2025 10:50
URI:	http://repository.corp.at/id/eprint/1249

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