The Woodlands, TX

The Woodlands is a forest with a city concealed in it — a master-planned community begun in 1974 by the oilman George P. Mitchell, who pioneered shale drilling and then spent the proceeds on an environmental ideal: a town for over 100,000 people threaded so carefully through the East Texas pines that from the parkways one sees mostly trees. Its centre is a waterway, not a square: a landscaped canal winds through the town core past restaurants and towers to a lake, plied by water taxis, in cheerful defiance of Houston's sprawl half an hour south.

The reason it stands in this archive is one of the great outdoor concert venues of the world: The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, named for the founder's wife, is the summer home of the Houston Symphony — one of the few purpose-built amphitheatre residencies of a major American orchestra — and regularly ranks among the highest-attended amphitheatres anywhere, its lawn holding thousands beneath the pines for programmes that run from Beethoven to headline rock, with performing-arts events offered at nominal prices as the Mitchells intended. A planned forest, a canal and a symphony under the stars: The Woodlands is Texan utopianism in its most livable form.