The Bold, the Brilliant, and the Bonkers: Wacky Ideas That Shaped Urban Planning

Urban planning has always attracted a particular type of person:

Dreamers. Reformers. Environmentalists. Activists. Social visionaries.

And occasionally—let’s be honest—people with ideas so ambitious they seem a little… bonkers.

The history of planning is full of bold attempts to design better societies through the physical layout of cities. Some of those ideas transformed the way we live. Others failed spectacularly. But taken together, they tell an important story about what it means to imagine better places.

Consider a few memorable examples.

In 1593, Venetian planners built the Italian town of Palmanova, a perfect Renaissance star. From above it looks magnificent: a geometrically precise fortress city with elegant symmetry and defensive walls radiating outward like the points of a compass. It was a masterpiece of design.

There was only one small problem: no one wanted to live there.

The planners had created the ideal town on paper, but they hadn’t fully accounted for the unpredictability of human life. Eventually the Venetian Republic resorted to pardoning criminals and offering incentives just to get people to live there.

Two centuries later, the French social theorist Charles Fourier proposed a model community known as the Phalanstère. His vision organized society into carefully structured cooperative communities of exactly 300 households. Streets, which he called “galleries,” were closed at both ends to create harmonious communal life.

It was imaginative. It was idealistic. But streets closed up at BOTH ends? It would have made getting around town rather difficult. Thank goodness it was never built.

Then came Robert Owen, the Welsh industrialist and reformer who founded the community of New Harmony in Indiana in 1825. Owen believed that if you designed the right social and physical environment, people would naturally cooperate and flourish. The town abolished private property and aimed to demonstrate a new form of communal living.

The experiment lasted three years.

Next came Étienne Cabet, who proposed an ideal communist society called Icaria. His vision imagined a thriving settlement of 10,000 people living together in equality and shared prosperity.

When settlers arrived in Texas to begin building the community, they failed to attract 10,000 people. They attracted sixty-nine.

If these stories sound a little eccentric, it’s because early planners were often trying to solve enormous social problems with entirely new models of community life. Their ideas sometimes overshot reality—but they also expanded the conversation about what cities could become.

By the early twentieth century, planning was becoming more professionalized, yet the bold visions continued.

In 1901, Ebenezer Howard published his influential concept of the Garden City, a carefully planned settlement surrounded by greenbelt and balanced between town and country. Howard even calculated the ideal population: exactly 32,000 people.

Not 30,000. Not 40,000. Precisely 32,000.

Coincidentally, that number is roughly the threshold Statistics Canada uses to define a “medium-sized city.” Which means that somewhere in British Columbia, the seaside community of Parksville may soon be approaching the optimal population envisioned by Howard more than a century ago.

Not all of these visionary thinkers were men. The American writer and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman offered a different kind of utopian thinking at the turn of the twentieth century. In her 1915 novel Herland, she imagined a cooperative society organized around shared wellbeing rather than competition. Gilman also wrote extensively about how housing design shaped social equality, proposing communal kitchens, cooperative domestic services, and shared childcare to free women from the isolation of household labour. While her ideas were radical for the time, they anticipated conversations planners continue to have today about co-housing, social infrastructure, and the design of communities that support everyday life.

Then there was Le Corbusier, whose Radiant City concept in the 1920s imagined sleek towers rising from open parkland, arranged with the precision of a machine. Streets would prioritize movement and efficiency. The city itself, he argued, should function as “a machine for living.”

The idea influenced generations of architects and planners, even as later critics pointed out that cities are not machines at all—they are ecosystems of human relationships.

Looking back, it’s easy to smile at some of these ideas. Their authors underestimated the complexity of real communities. But it would be a mistake to dismiss them entirely. Every one of these proposals came from a serious attempt to improve human life. These were earnest people, earnestly trying to do the right thing. Reminds me of me.

Howard’s Garden City helped inspire parks, greenbelts, and healthier suburban planning. Utopian reformers pushed early conversations about housing conditions and worker wellbeing. Even the more controversial ideas relate to today’s planners working to rethink how cities balance efficiency with livability.

In other words, progress in city-building has often come from people willing to imagine something radically different from the status quo. Planning has never been a profession for those who simply accept cities as they are.

Rather, it belongs to the bold thinkers willing to ask difficult questions: How should we live together? What makes a neighbourhood flourish? How can the design of streets, homes, and public spaces create healthier communities?

Sometimes those questions produce brilliant ideas. Sometimes they produce ideas that seem a little… um… bonkers.

But without that spirit of experimentation—without the dreamers, reformers, and visionaries—we would never discover better possibilities for our cities.

Urban planning, after all, begins with a simple but powerful act: Someone looks at the world as it exists… and dares to imagine it otherwise.