Garden Cities

The concept of the garden city is attributed to Ebenezer Howard in England, who developed the garden city concept in 1898 as a means of developing towns that had pleasing environments. According to his vision, garden cities were to be self-contained communities. Emphasis was on a manageable population size, neighborhood service centers, mixed land uses, much green space, pedestrian walkways, and a self-contained employment base. In other words, cities were to be socially, economically, and ecologically sustainable. He put his ideas into practice by founding two such cities in England: Letchworth Garden City in 1903, and Welwyn Garden City in 1920. These two cities, although far from fully realizing Howard's vision, continue to serve as excellent examples of healthy and livable communities. Ebenezer Howard is recognized as a pioneer of town planning whose utopian ideals were to establish a new social and industrial order via the establishment of garden cities. The principles applied to Letchworth and Welwyn were an experiment to try and overcome the problems of overcrowded, unhealthy cities, depressed rural areas, and the poor building standards prevailing in some areas by the end of the Victorian Era.

Ebenezer Howard's concept of the garden city had two aims: to solve together the problems of the congested city and of the “undeveloped” countryside. By mixing the town and the country together, residents would get the benefits of both. He suggested the optimum population for such a city to be 32,000 people with fewer than 30 houses per hectare. At the center of the city would be a central park or open green space surrounded by housing with factories on the edges of the city. The city would be then be surrounded by a green belt to check urban sprawl. Sewage would be recycled and put back into the land. He envisioned independent, but environmentally sound towns that were self-sufficient in almost everything.

Howard's ideas continue to guide urban planning, especially in the development of new towns that are intended to fulfill a number of functions, such as relieving overcrowding of large cities, providing an optimum living environment for residents, helping to control urban sprawl and preserving open land. Examples of such new towns influenced by Howard's work include Margarethenhohe near Essen in Germany, Sunnyside Gardens near New York, Chatham village in Pittsburgh, Radburn in New Jersey, and Reston in Virginia. Elsewhere in the world, new capital cities have been built utilizing this concept. These include Brasilia in Brazil and Lilongwe in Malawi. Other cities, for example Guayana in Venezuela, have been developed utilizing the self-contained ideas of a garden city to serve as growth poles for industrial and regional development.

Building upon Howard's ideas, one of the most important new philosophies in suburban design is the concept of New Urbanism. The philosophy stems from the unsightly nature of American urban sprawl and became very popular in the 1980s. New neighborhoods are designed to be people-friendly, with a diverse range of housing and jobs. The idea is to design neighborhoods that have pleasing and appropriate architecture and planning, and beautiful residences integrated with jobs. Such an approach to planning urban environments would reduce traffic and pollution, increase the supply of affordable homes, and contain urban sprawl. Examples of such new towns in the United States include the resort community of Seaside, Florida, whose planning follows the traditionalist approach with mixed-use neighborhood design containing gridded streets, front porches, sidewalks, and a village-like atmosphere where one can conduct daily business without the use of a car.

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