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The new town concept originated from the ideal city model of Ebenezer Howard and expanded from Europe to America in the 1900s. It has reemerged as a site for accommodating population from highly dense urban centers of China and India since the early twenty-first century. The massive infusion of public and private investments has enabled the emergence of new towns in China and India as planned centers of world-class residential, commercial, and work spaces. The rational goal of de-densifying the crowded central cities can lead to a more balanced distribution and use of resources across the metropolitan regions with more spacious housing for the growing middle class in China and India. Yet it is a relatively small number of the wealthy and mobile people who have turned out to be beneficiaries of the mostly high-end housing and well-developed transport infrastructure that evokes social and economic polarizations and political contestations. In this chapter, we will examine: (1) how these top-down planned and developed new towns have reshaped the urbanization process of the megacities in India and China, (2) the socio-spatial influence of these settlements on the central city as well as the surrounding rural areas, and (3) the expected and actual spatial users (both old and new residents) of the new towns? We address these questions by organizing two pairs of cases in a systematic framework: Anting New Town and Thames Town in Shanghai, China and Rajarhat New Town and the Kolkata West International City (KWIC) near Kolkata, India.

World population is expected to increase by some 2.6 billion from 6.9 billion in 2010 to more than 9.5 billion by mid-century. Most of this population increase will occur in the developing nations, and most of this increase will be absorbed in the rapidly expanding metropolitan regions of these countries – the so-called megacities of the twenty-first century (United Nations, 2009). And as urban development accelerates across the globe, most of the population increase will occur in the emerging megacities and other metropolitan areas in Africa, Asia and South America. Because the original areas of settlement in the city centre have long been established, much of the population increase in these metropolitan regions will occur in the suburban areas of cities in the Global South – areas of favelas and shanty towns alongside earlier middle-class and upper-class suburbs, newly planned gated communities and garden suburbs, and indigenous models of suburban growth that will emerge in the next century.