Planned Cities of the World: 17 Cities Built From a Master Plan

A planned city is one laid out to a master plan before most of it was built, instead of growing piece by piece over centuries. The best-known examples are national capitals: Washington, D.C. (planned by Pierre Charles L'Enfant in 1791), Canberra (designed by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, named in 1913), Brasília (inaugurated on 21 April 1960) and Islamabad (established in 1967). Others were built for provinces, like La Plata and Chandigarh, or to take people out of crowded cities, like Letchworth and Milton Keynes in England. The 17 cities below span more than three centuries, from Saint Petersburg in 1703 to Nusantara, Indonesia's capital still under construction on Borneo.

17 Planned Cities, From Saint Petersburg to Nusantara

The table gives each city's founding year (for capitals, the year government moved in; building usually started earlier) and the people who drew its plan.

The sections below group them by era and region, since cities built in the same decades often borrowed the same ideas.

Washington, La Plata and Belo Horizonte: Grids Cut by Diagonals

The Residence Act of 16 July 1790 placed the new American capital on the Potomac River, and in 1791 President George Washington gave the job of planning it to L'Enfant, a French engineer who had served in the Continental Army. L'Enfant arrived in Georgetown on 9 March 1791 and produced a street grid crossed by broad diagonal avenues that meet at circles and squares. Congress left Philadelphia for the half-finished city in 1800. The L'Enfant Plan later influenced the plans of Brasília, New Delhi and Canberra.

La Plata applied the same grid-and-diagonal idea at provincial scale. When the city of Buenos Aires was federalised in 1880, Buenos Aires province needed a new capital. Governor Dardo Rocha founded La Plata on 19 November 1882 on a site 9 km inland from the Río de la Plata, and the planner Pedro Benoit drew a square city with a central park, two main diagonal avenues and a small park or square every six blocks. Streets are numbered rather than named, and the city is still called "la ciudad de las diagonales". Its partido counted 772,618 people in the 2022 census.

Belo Horizonte, built in the 1890s to replace the hill town of Ouro Preto as capital of Minas Gerais, is often called Brazil's first planned modern city. Its engineers Aarão Reis and Francisco Bicalho looked to Washington for their model.

Brasília and Belmopan: Capitals Moved Inland in the Americas

The idea of a Brazilian capital in the interior goes back to 1827, when José Bonifácio, an adviser to Emperor Pedro I, proposed a city called Brasília. Rio de Janeiro had been capital since 1763, and almost everything, from population to investment, clung to the Atlantic coast. President Juscelino Kubitschek took office in January 1956 promising to build the city; Lúcio Costa won the competition for the master plan in 1957, and the city was built in 41 months and inaugurated on 21 April 1960. Costa's Plano Piloto is laid out like an aeroplane: the "fuselage" is the Monumental Axis, a pair of avenues either side of a long park, and the "cockpit" is the Praça dos Três Poderes, ringed by the presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court. Oscar Niemeyer designed the white modernist government buildings.

Brasília was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, and with about 2.8 million people it is now Brazil's third-most populous city. Belmopan is the opposite extreme. Hurricane Hattie almost destroyed the port of Belize City in 1961, and the government built a new capital 80 km inland, in Cayo District at 76 m above sea level, moving there in 1970. Its National Assembly Building was designed to resemble a pre-Columbian Maya temple. With 20,754 people in 2022, Belmopan is the smallest capital by population in the continental Americas.

Canberra, New Delhi and Chandigarh: Imperial and Post-Imperial Capitals

When the Australian colonies federated on 1 January 1901, neither Sydney nor Melbourne would accept the other as capital. The compromise put the new city in New South Wales but at least 160 km (100 mi) from Sydney, with Melbourne as temporary seat of government. The site was chosen in 1908, and an international design competition ran from 30 April 1911 to 31 January 1912. The Royal Institute of British Architects boycotted it because the minister, King O'Malley, insisted on making the final choice himself, and the winners were two American architects, the Griffins. Their plan, influenced by the garden city movement, aligned its axes on Black Mountain, Mount Ainslie, Capital Hill and City Hill, and placed an artificial lake at the centre. The city was named Canberra in 1913 and had an estimated 484,630 people in 2025.

New Delhi was a statement of empire. Calcutta was the capital of British India until December 1911, when George V laid the foundation stone of a new city south of central Delhi at the Delhi Durbar. Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker designed its axial avenues and government buildings, and the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, inaugurated the capital on 13 February 1931.

Chandigarh came out of the partition of 1947, which gave Lahore, the old capital of undivided Punjab, to Pakistan and left Indian Punjab without a capital. The American planner Albert Mayer and the Polish architect Maciej Nowicki drew the first plans. Le Corbusier took over in 1951, working with Jane Drew, Maxwell Fry and Pierre Jeanneret. He kept the superblocks but standardised them into numbered "sectors", 30 in the first phase and 17 in the second. President Rajendra Prasad inaugurated the city on 7 October 1953, and the Capitol Complex became part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing of Le Corbusier's work in July 2016. Chandigarh now serves as the shared capital of both Punjab and Haryana.

Islamabad, Abuja and Gaborone: New Capitals for New Nations

Several countries that became independent in the 20th century built capitals on fresh ground. For Pakistan, a commission recommended in 1959 a site north-east of Rawalpindi, which served as provisional capital while the new city went up beneath the Margalla Hills. The Greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis divided Islamabad into eight zones on a triangular grid with its apex towards the hills. The city was established in 1967 and replaced Karachi; it now has more than 1.1 million people.

Nigeria wanted a capital that no single ethnic or religious group could claim, and Lagos was badly overcrowded. Decree No. 6 of 4 February 1976 began the move to a site at the country's geographic centre. The consortium International Planning Associates was commissioned in June 1977 to draw the master plan, and the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange designed the monumental core. Abuja became the capital on 12 December 1991. Its layout runs south from Aso Rock, a 400 m rock monolith, and the city counted 776,298 people at the 2006 census.

Gaborone was chosen in the mid-1960s, as the Bechuanaland Protectorate prepared for independence as Botswana, because it belonged to no single indigenous group and had fresh water nearby. It is named after Chief Gaborone of the Tlokwa. The plan placed a long commercial strip, the Main Mall, beside a semicircle of government offices. Its population was 246,325 in 2022.

Putrajaya, Naypyidaw and Nusantara: 21st-Century Administrative Cities

The most recent planned capitals were built mainly to house ministries. Malaysia began building Putrajaya in August 1995, at an estimated cost of US$8.1 billion, and moved the federal government there from Kuala Lumpur in 1999. The judiciary followed in 2003. Kuala Lumpur is still the constitutional capital and the seat of the king and parliament, so Putrajaya is officially the administrative centre.

Myanmar's military government began building Naypyidaw in 2002 on a greenfield site near Pyinmana, about 320 km north of Yangon. It became the administrative capital on 6 November 2005, its name was announced on Armed Forces Day, 27 March 2006, and construction ran until about 2012 at an estimated US$4 billion. The name means "abode of the king".

Indonesia is building Nusantara on the east coast of Borneo, in East Kalimantan, to replace Jakarta, which suffers from overcrowding and land subsidence. Work began in 2022; the project is valued at about Rp 523 trillion (US$35 billion) and is scheduled in five phases to 2045. The country held its Independence Day ceremony there for the first time on 17 August 2024.

Saint Petersburg, Letchworth and Milton Keynes: Planned Cities That Are Not Capitals Today

Peter the Great founded Saint Petersburg on 27 May 1703 on the site of a captured Swedish fortress. By 1716 Domenico Trezzini had drawn a scheme for a centre on Vasilyevsky Island laid out on a rectangular grid of canals, and Jean-Baptiste Le Blond was appointed chief architect. The city was Russia's capital from 1712 to 1918 apart from 1728 to 1730.

Letchworth tested an idea rather than a political need. Ebenezer Howard's 1898 book proposed self-contained "garden cities" combining jobs, housing and countryside, and in 1903 his company, First Garden City Limited, bought the land. Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker laid out the town, which includes Sollershott Circus, the United Kingdom's first roundabout, built around 1909. The town had 33,990 people in 2021.

Milton Keynes was the largest of England's post-war new towns. Its designation order was made on 23 January 1967 over 22,000 acres (about 9,000 ha) that took in Bletchley, Wolverton, Stony Stratford, Fenny Stratford and fifteen villages, about 40,000 people in all. The development corporation laid a grid of roads roughly 1 km apart, capped houses outside the centre at three storeys, and about 25% of today's urban area is parkland or woodland. The urban area had 264,349 people at the 2021 census.

Many planned capitals end up overshadowed by an older commercial city; our list of capital cities that are not the largest city covers that pattern. For more on the two best-known capitals here, see the guides to Brasília and Canberra.