I spent a good part of my childhood in a cozy little housing development in a college town. I guess it doesn’t quite qualify as a planned community, but it had a lot of the benefits of one. We had plenty of parks and green spaces nearby. In fact, I spent every day in summer down in the ravine, cooling my feet in the creek and drinking in the sunshine. We’d leave after breakfast with a thermos of KoolAid and a couple of sandwiches in a backpack, and some days we wouldn’t come home until it was near dark.
Our school was so close that you could see the baseball diamond and the soccer field from my bedroom window. Right before school was a little mini-mall. The doctor’s office was there, and the Becker’s. We were proud when Mom started to let us take the milk jugs back to the store, and maybe pick up a loaf of bread for her. Mostly, we just went so we could get a popsicle from the change. When we started getting an allowance we would buy those packs of bubble gum that had the trading cards in them. I had a whole collection of Happy Days and Charlie’s Angels cards….
Our Brownie Pack met at the school, as did our church. The congregation was raising funds to buy a property and pay for the building of the church. We used the school gym to hold services in the meantime. Classrooms & the library were used for Sunday school, and the kindergarten room doubled as a nursery each week. My Mom volunteered in the nursery regularly, and since we were so close to the school I believe she had nursery at our house one summer when the church hosted a vacation Bible school.
We look back fondly on those years. My parents always say it was a good place to raise a family. There were so many activities for kids, so many places to visit and things to do. We had recreational weekend classes at the local high school, the parks department ran drop-in summer day camps. The library came around weekly with a bookmobile. There were beautiful forested areas to visit, and a river running through the middle of town. We didn’t lack for movies or museums, either. There were several historic sites to tour, and a pioneer village as well. And I can still remember going to the drive-in with Mom & Dad, dressed in my pyjamas and tucked in the back seat with a blanket and my little sister, when we got too tired to stay up for the second feature.
Every now and again I think about going back, bringing my family to live in the place that was home for me as a child.
And sometimes I think about a planned community too. We’ve been hearing about these places quite a bit over the past few years. They’re towns or cities that have been carefully planned so that homes and services are placed exactly where they best fit. Unlike other towns that have grown up over time, a planned city is conceived first and built around the plan. Sometimes we associate planned communities with retirees, as a sort of retirement village where active seniors can enjoy recreation, beautiful scenery and pleasant weather.
Did you know that planned communities have been around since the 1800’s, though? They’ve been called “planned cities” and “new towns,” and some that followed the town-country design are also known as “garden cities.” Many of Canada’s western towns were planned communities. Under the leadership of Sir John A. Macdonald, the Canadian government gave every second square mile of land along the proposed route to the CPR, who chose its preferred sites for stations and planned the layouts of a good many western Canadian towns in the process.
Medicine Hat and Moose Jaw were two of the towns planned by the CPR in the west of Canada. Some towns, located on land not owned by the railway, were actually re-located. That is, the people of the town moved onto land selected by the CPR and the town they settled in was built to the company’s specifications. Later towns, like Corner Brook and Grand Falls in Newfoundland, Témiscaming and Fermont in Quebec, were also company towns.
Planned communities weren’t just about the needs of a company to do business, however. Sometimes they were developed by utopian societies. Some planned communities in France go back to the 12th - 14th century. The bastides as they were called, were intended to replace towns destroyed by the Hundred Years War. They were also a force of social change, for the farmers who moved to these new cities went from being vassals of a feudal lord to being free men. They were encouraged to work the land around the bastides because it attracted trade, but instead of being taxed on their production they paid their taxes on trade.
The city of Beijing, founded in the 1st millennium BCE, is another example of a planned community. Like other Chinese cities it is planned along the principles of Feng Shui, which use a rectangular grid and a rectilinear road grid, and emphasize balance above all else. The man who runs our local dépanneur is Chinese, and he often comments on how the homes here seem to be built helter skelter, while in the city where he grew up everything is planned. People don’t suffer in their homes in the heat of summer where he comes from, because the houses are built so a breeze blows through them and helps to cool the building.
So planned communities aren’t a new innovation, but they are still attracting people all over the world. Eagle Mountain Reserve boasts beautiful Texas lake real estate for seasonal vacationers, permanent residents and retirees. A wonderful example of a planned community, it offers gorgeous lakefront scenery, recreation and nearby cultural attractions. There are hydroelectric plants on the lakes, providing a clean power source. And for those who appreciate wine, there are a number of vineyards nearby too.
The master plan gives an idea of how a planned community might be laid out. Like many planned communities it is not so far from the city as to be out of reach - it’s just remote enough to be a peaceful refuge from the workaday world. Only 70 miles outside of Austin, the community is close enough to the “big city” to allow for day trips or overnights.
Planned communities can be found as well in Europe, South America, the United States and Pakistan, among other places. A study of some of these towns could be an introduction to the subject of urban planning (as well as a bit of a trip down memory lane for me!) Besides being interesting from a more or less geographical point of view, they have often been places for visionaries or sites for social change.
This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.
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Just a quick reminder that 17 March 2008 is the last day to benefit from the free download of this valuable reading guide for the book Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. The guide contains professional looking reproducibles that will be useful to both the homeschooler and the classroom teacher.