Garden City

History

In 1899, Ebenezer Howard founded the Garden City Association, a group formed to promote his ideas for planned communities, which would be include balanced areas of residential, industrial, and commercial spaces, surrounded by greenbelt and agricultural areas, to produce a healthy living environment—smokeless, slumless communities— for the urban dweller. Howard was influenced by his reading of Edward Bellamy's socialist utopian novels, Looking Backward (1888) and Equality (1897), although elements of the Garden City could be found in earlier planning efforts (Benjamin Ward Richardson, for example, published Hygeia: A City of Health, his plan for a model city to alleviate the unhealthy conditions of the industrial city, in 1876). Howard's plan for the Garden City was first published in 1899 as Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, but the book did not generate much attention; a revised version titled Garden Cities of Tomorrow, published in 1904, became a cornerstone in urban planning.

The Garden City was designed to house some 32,000 people on a site of 6,000 acres. Six radial boulevards 120 feet wide extended from the center, [Page 287]creating a radial pattern, with open spaces and parks separating areas for residential, industrial, institutional, and other uses. The Garden City was intended to be self-sufficient, to include a mix of employment as well as sufficient agricultural land to feed the local population. The Garden City was bordered by a greenbelt to separate it from other cities. In one mapping included in the original publication but not in Garden Cities, a ring of planned communities surrounds a larger, central city; the communities are connected to the central city and to the other suburban centers by rail transport. The Garden City was a blend of the city and nature, but without the problems of pollution and overcrowding found in the large industrial city.

Ebenezer Howard's design for the Garden City

Source: Howard, Ebenezer. 1902. Garden Cities of Tomorrow, p. 22. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.

With financial support from William Hesketh Lever, the first Garden City, Letchworth, was built in Hertfordshire, north of London (Lever was in the midst of construction of Port Sunlight, a planned industrial community outside of Liverpool, during this period). Letchworth was viewed as a successful implementation of the Garden City, with new homes and ample open space, a wide range of industries to provide employment for town residents, and an agricultural greenbelt to control further expansion. After World War I, the British government provided support for the second Garden City, in Welwyn, also in Hertfordshire. The Garden City would also serve as a more general model for smaller developments, including the Hampstead garden suburb and Gidea Park in London, and for garden cities in other countries as well, including Hellerau (a suburb of Dresden) in 1909 and Bromma (in Stockholm) beginning in 1910.

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