GARDEN CITIES OF TOMORROW

EBENEZER HOWARD

At the turn of the 19th century, much excoriated by Jane Jacobs in the 1960s as a “decentralist” utopian against real cities.

“Calthorpe's Portland regional plan is basically Ebenezer Howard's Social City, with some new color graphics.”

Peter Hall sees Howard has an anarchist, something he appreciates, and insists that contemporary planning could gain from returning to its garden city roots.

Sir Ebenezer Howard (29 January 1850[1]– May 1, 1928) is known for his publication Garden Cities of To-morrow (1898), the description of a utopian city in which people live harmoniously together with nature. The publication resulted in the founding of the garden city movement, that realized several Garden Cities in Great Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. Billerica Garden Suburb,Inc.(1914), was the first housing in the United States on the Howard plan.

He goes right into giving precise prescriptions for the new city, down to acreage and expenses. 6000 acres of cheap rural land are to be purchased, 1000 of which are reserved for the city. A 32,000 person population cap is set, after which a new city will have to be colonized.

The ConceptThe Concept

As far as the design goes, Howard wants to make it as little like the overcrowded London of his day as possible.

So public parks and private lawns are everywhere. The roads are incredibly wide, ranging from 120 to 420 feet for the Grand Avenue, and they are radial rather than linear.

Commercial, industrial, residential, and public uses are clearly differentiated from each other spatially.

The DesignThe Design

The overall goal for Howard is to combine the traditional countryside with the traditional town. For too long residents have had to make the unfulfilling choice between living in a culturally isolated rural area or giving up nature to live in a city, but "human society and the beauty of nature are meant to be enjoyed together."

The two "magnets" of Town and Country that have in the past pulled people in either direction will, in the future, be synthesized into one "Town-Country magnet." Someone just needs to build the first one.

Howard is completely earnest in his attempts to built Garden City.

In fact, most of the book can be read as a business model being pitched to potential investors. He assures interested parties that he can get them a 4.5% return.

Howard makes it clear that he is not a socialist, and he does not see centralized government playing an initial role.

The closest thing that can relate his plan to is a homeowners' association on steroids, he calls it a "quasi-public body," which owns all the land of the city and leases it out to residents. The financial linchpin of the plan is the fact that all of the land is purchased up front, so that the increase in property values generated by the growth will be captured by the community itself.

Howard's enthusiastic embrace of progress. He even sees human beings becoming less selfish, as modern advances in science and technology open up frontiers of human flourishing.

Newer is better, just as the railroad is better than the stagecoach. After laying out his final vision for a network of brand-new garden cities, what he calls the Social City, he briefly considers whether any of the older cities can be salvaged and readapted.

Not really. After a precipitous fall in land values, due to migrants opting to move to the newer garden cities, London will have to be mostly destroyed. Only then might it be refashioned into a modern city.

He also assumes that if everything is planned rationally from the beginning, the costly process of retrofitting old infrastructure for new technology can be avoided.

Howard's understanding of metaphysical synthesis, which is a theme throughout the work, was frankly crude. We writes:

"Town and country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.“