[Dilbert San Diego]

Do any of these planned cities ever work out?

Reston, Virginia, Columbia,Maryland, Seaside, Florida come to mind. Have any of these places lived up to the promise of the new urbanist promise of being a better more livable city?

[ifinnegan]

Don’t know. Reston seems a fine city, but whether that is due to it being planned, I doubt.

With or without Gates and planned cities this area will be developed.

[ROCKLOBSTER]

Do any of these planned cities ever work out?

It might work if there were no residential areas allowed, just commercial, retail, and industrial.

[Jeff Chandler]

Do any of these planned cities ever work out?

The City of La Mirada, California gained national attention during the boom of the 1950’s, as it was slated to become one of the nation’s first pre-planned cities and was even known as “the Nation’s completely planned city”. The nation’s completely planned city was praised by California’s State Fair organization as being a city that meets the needs of both today and tomorrow. The California State Fair awarded Harold Shaw the first Gold Medal Award to a builder for his achievement in the construction of La Mirada.

Source: Los Angeles Times - October 11, 1953

It's still a nice place to live.

http://www.discoverlamirada.com/history/

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Critics of Brasília's (Brazil's planned capital city, Brasilia) grand scale have characterized it as a modernist platonic fantasy about the future: Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future. This is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent, and talented men start thinking in terms of space rather than place; and single rather than multiple meanings. It's what you get when you design for political aspirations rather than real human needs. You get miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens. This, one may fervently hope, is the last experiment of its kind. The utopian buck stops here. — Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, Episode 4: "Trouble in Utopia", (1980)