MK Literary Festival looks at new towns and cities across the world

New towns around the globe have been vast experiments in living. What do these places have in common, and what challenges do they face? Join two leading commentators on the built environment, Owen Hatherley and John Grindrod, as they discuss new towns in Scotland (Cumbernauld), Poland (Nowa Huta), and Japan (Tama) – as well as Milton Keynes itself.

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Hear how the different towns have each attempted to deal with the complex issues that have dictated their creation: coping with the car, enacting very different state housing policies, attracting light industry, and building grand public buildings, all the while coping with the tensions between modern and traditional styles and philosophies.

You can anticipate a fun, opinionated and enlightening discussion - with opportunities for your questions too!

About Owen Hatherley

Owen Hatherley writes about aesthetics and politics for the Architectural Review, The Guardian and the London Review of Books, among others. He is the author of many books, most recently Modern Buildings in Britain: a Gazetteer (Penguin, 2022), Artificial Islands (Repeater, 2022) - which won Best Book and Best Monograph at the 2023 Architectural Book Awards - and Transitional Objects: Photographs of Poland (the modernist, 2023). He is a commissioning editor at Jacobin.

About John Grindrod

John Grindrod is a social historian of modern places. He is the author of Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain; Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt; and Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain. He is a resident of Milton Keynes.

To book tickets for this event or for any of the Online Programme events for 2024, visit the Festival website. You can also follow the Festival on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, or sign up for their email newsletter.