Rosemary Wakeman Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, 376 pp., 71 b/w illus. $45, ISBN 9780226346038 Rosemary Wakeman's ambitious book Practicing Utopia explains how the new town movement, which played a major role in regional growth strategies in the West, became a transnational movement during its golden age of 1945 to 1975. Wakeman notes in her introduction that she consciously resists any ultimate definition of what constitutes a new town because meaning must be dependent on the specifics of time and place. Her aim is to explore why the new town became “such a powerful talisman of the future” (17). To answer this question, she states, she will not provide a survey of new towns or physical descriptions of such towns, but instead will dissect these “visionary dreamscapes” intellectually (17). This contradicts the title of her book, which refers to illusionary utopia implemented in practice. It is regarding that practice, carried out by an international network of experts with a variety of institutional support in housing, urban design, and infrastructure development, that Wakeman's book is particularly illuminating. Failing to provide a tight definition of the new town movement allows Wakeman to cast her net far and wide, drawing in an astounding number of examples. New towns were capital- and infrastructure-intensive megaprojects requiring mass state investments; exported to former colonies, they became pawns in the Cold War politics of containment; as instruments of postwar reconstruction, they were deployed to address the housing crisis, the congestion of inner cities, and the nightmare of sprawl; they were assets to the military–industrial complex, located next to sites of steel and oil production, mineral extraction, energy production, and aircraft manufacture, as well as near massive ports. In short, the construction of new towns was essential to national and international prosperity and development around the globe. The book is organized into two parts: the first discusses the original ideology of the new …