Garden city concept of physical planning

1. GARDEN CITIES OF
TOMORROW
EBENEZER HOWARD

2.  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.

3. 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

4. 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

5.  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.

6.  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.

7.  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.

8.  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.“