Re:New Towns Symposium

Join us for a symposium on Thursday 16 – Friday 17 April 2026 at Newcastle University where we address what a ‘New Town’ can mean today and aim to gather local perspectives on national planning policies.

The wider project – Re: New Towns

This event is part of a wider project, Re: New Towns, responding to the UK government’s New Towns policy, and hopes to eventually engage local communities in meaningful dialogue with local authorities. Re: New Towns seeks to remember, and go beyond, the UK’s most significant urban movements of the post-war era: the New Town developments of the 1950s and 60s, and the Urban Renaissance of the 1990s and 2000s. We want to explore ideas, designs, tools, techniques, concepts, methods and media.

Suggesting an expansion of urban fabric and civic life, a New Town creates a dynamic arena of interaction amongst diverse stakeholders. It calls for a balanced synergy of perspectives, lived experiences, skills, roles, and expertise: a relational and holistic understanding of how we speculate, design, build and inhabit landscapes, appreciating how towns produce communities, cultures, ideologies, and inequalities.

Full details of the symposium here.

Rethinking New Towns – Thurs 16 April

Join us at the Farrell Centre on 16 April for a special edition of our Where We Live Now lecture series, in which designer Wayne Hemingway will be rethinking New Towns. Find out more here.