Simon Creer, Director of Communications and External Affairs at the RTPI.

With the winter Olympics kicking off this week, I’d like to take you back to a time nearly 20 years ago.

In 2007, London was given the opportunity to host the Olympics, albeit the summer games. And what followed was the usual British response of grumbling and low expectations. The UK can’t deliver things like that people claimed, or how could we possibly best China?

This kind of response is baked into our national psyche for some reason.

But what happened?

London hosted an absolutely outstanding games with the support of planners who laid out the master plan for the stadium and surrounds in Stratford. Planners were future-thinking enough to not only support the delivery of the games but also rejuvenate a corner of London, which, nearly 20 years on, is a thriving commercial, community and cultural hub.

That’s brilliant, but why do we always let that early self-doubt creep in?

I’ve been thinking a lot about that recently after RTPI published the Future New Towns report.

We know that there is a dim popular view of the last round of new towns. When we asked them last year, the most common words people came up with were ‘concrete’, ‘boring’ and ‘roundabouts’. Nearly three-quarters of those asked didn’t think that future new towns would meet the needs of communities in fifty years’ time.

It’s that same grumbling and pessimism coming in again. We’re just not that good at doing this kind of stuff.

There are families living in Stratford, dancers at Sadler’s Wells East and visitors to the V&A Storehouse that may beg to disagree.

That’s why this latest piece of research is so essential; it pulls together international examples and case studies of successful new towns from across the world. It shows what is possible in a variety of different policy frameworks when care and attention are taken in their development.

It also shows that policy is something to work from and not something you aim towards.

The research also shows that if we want to avoid the generally curmudgeonly attitude that has built up around the last wave, then we need to build flexibility into the design from the very beginning. They need to be able to breathe, bend and adapt to whatever may come down the line in the future.

The hard unflexible lines of places like Cumbernauld need to be left behind for new towns and developments that can grow with their communities.

We know this, we’ve done it before. We did it so well that we turned a sports tournament into a home.

These new towns will be the legacy of our generation of planners. They will show not only what they were capable of today, but also that they were capable of thinking into the future and planning for the world we all want to see.

Anyone who knows me may be surprised by the optimistic call to arms. They’d have me pegged as an absolute naysayer, but the difference is I have complete confidence in our members to deliver future new towns that their great-grandchildren will be proud of.