The argument is grounded in a deliberately mixed body of sources
This page records the sources used to develop the theory of a town organized around a portfolio of industries. The evidence is not uniform. Some primary texts and institutional materials were read directly; some materials are secondary explanations or case summaries; and some sources could not be retrieved. Those distinctions matter, because a source list should show not only what supports an argument but also where verification remains incomplete.
The central ideas draw on directly read primary and institutional materials
The historical and conceptual foundation includes the full text of Ebenezer Howard’s *Garden Cities of To-morrow*, Michael Porter’s white paper *Clusters and Economic Policy: Aligning Public Policy with the New Economics of Competition*, and Jane Jacobs’s *The Death and Life of Great American Cities*. Porter’s 1998 Harvard Business Review article was identified but its PDF did not return the article text, so it is not treated as directly verified here. Jacobs’s book was read through a complete PDF hosted by a third party.
The material on the 15-minute city includes a public extract from Carlos Moreno’s *The 15-Minute City*, Moreno’s 2019 declaration, and the 2021 paper “Introducing the 15-Minute City.” A university explanation is also included as a secondary account. Material on local commerce includes the City of Paris page on commercial diversity, a trade-publication account of Paris Commerces, an explanatory account of French commercial leases, and an APUR page on the revitalization of local shops and services.
The economic and policy material includes an encyclopedia entry on economic base theory, the abstract of Bartik’s *Who Benefits from State and Local Economic Development Policies?*, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry page on the Regional Future Investment Promotion Act, the Japan Location Center’s material on corporate-location incentives, Aichi Prefecture’s incentive information, and a section of the 2023 White Paper on Small and Medium Enterprises concerning local-government efforts to attract companies. The material on Basque cluster policy could not be retrieved and therefore remains unverified.
Case materials illustrate possibilities, but their evidentiary status varies
The sources concerning Letchworth, British new towns, company towns, and business improvement districts are not all primary sources. Letchworth is represented by a Wikipedia article, the British new-town material by a research page from Montagu Evans, the company-town material by an RIETI article, and the business-improvement-district material by a paper available through PubMed Central. These should be read as secondary or explanatory sources rather than as interchangeable evidence from original records.
The Curitiba material combines several types of source. It includes a secondary account of fifty years of Curitiba’s bus rapid transit system, another secondary account discussing the system’s legacy and limits, a peer-reviewed paper on the integration of transport-network companies and taxis, and institutional or professional accounts from the Inter-American Development Bank and the Royal Town Planning Institute. It also includes a secondary account of the Industrial City of Curitiba and an Audi corporate page concerning Curitiba and São José dos Pinhais. The Curitiba BRT account marks some statements as inferences, and its claim about the amount of supplementary funding was not verified against a primary source. A number of other potentially relevant materials were not retrieved, including items hosted by ResearchGate, thecityfix, Kyoto University, Columbia Academic Commons, and Sage.
The broader material on large projects and delay includes a Cato Policy Report article by Bent Flyvbjerg, a Project Management Institute account of megaprojects, a Brookings article on infrastructure permitting, a secondary account of land-assembly challenges, a Town and Country Planning Association contribution on delivering a fourth generation of new towns, and a 2025 meta-analysis of construction-project delays in different countries. The sources on infrastructure-project delays from Sage, ScienceDirect, and Emerald were identified but not retrieved, so they are not treated as verified evidence.
Taken together, these materials support a framework that links a town’s economic base, industrial clustering, everyday access, local commerce, public policy, transport, land assembly, and delivery risk. The framework is a synthesis of the sources above, not a claim that every proposition has the same level of empirical confirmation. In particular, some case interpretations are based on secondary material, some statements are explicitly inferential, and several identified sources remain unavailable for direct checking.