India’s Jamshedpur was established by Tata Steel in 1919 and now has a population of 1.3m people. Do such cities provide a better quality of life and make life easier for urban planners?

Corporate-built or sponsored cities are appearing all over the world, from Toyota’s Woven City in Japan to Neom in Saudi Arabia. At their early 20th century peak in the US, there were around 2,500 ‘company towns’. They appeared an ideal solution for a big employer to house lots of workers in the same place and keep them happy.

However, running a town or city can be more complicated than it appears at first. There are implications for surveyors in the creation of the city and the workers who eventually live there. What lessons can be learned from one of the world’s oldest corporate cities, Jamshedpur in India?

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