Not always! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmeloord
The trick is to not aim too high.
All towns in this area are 'planned cities'. 1 larger one (Emmeloord) in the middle, and a bunch of smaller towns at equal distances around it. The goal for these towns was never prestige or some 'national symbol'; the goal was food, for which you need farmers. Farmers need towns for groceries, schools, and so on, so towns would come.
Emmeloord itself was designed as a 'modern town' with straight roads and whatnot. The other towns were designed as if they had organically grown (church in the middle, expand from there). The town names were made up by linguists to sound like they could've been 'real' historically-evolved place names. All of it was intended to be practical and feel familiar.
In my personal opinion, much of it turned out quite well. Emmeloord itself would've been better of without the 'modern' city plan IMO, but there's many other cities (or large suburbs) much like it because of the urbanization wave in the 60s.
The area is not especiallly known or celebrated by the Dutch. It is what it is: a dull rural area with a dull central town. Which was exactly the idea.
Like the "Blauwestad" which failed. http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blauwestad_(project) (Dutch)
EDIT: Oh wait, that's exactly what you meant.
It's like "building a city." Whenever someone tries, it's a disaster. It's artificial, it's authoritarian, it's clumsy.
What to do instead? I don't know. Solve a problem for someone. Build a place for your friends. Make a tool. Make a script. Make a meme. Start a club. Build a boat.
I'm more and more interested in the anthropological viewpoint. Looking at us as, well, a human culture. People in Papua New Guinea build boats and tools. And here we are building "products."
pg's saying this but from a more capitalist viewpoint: that successful startups start as solutions to problems, that the best ideas come from your own problems, and so on.
I think that if we bracket out the question of making money, it's still interesting to think about. What is a "product?" Is it different from other created things?