Garden city movement

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Ebenezer Howard's 3 magnets diagram which addressed the question 'Where will the people go?', the choices being 'Town', 'Country' or 'Town-Country'

The garden city movement is an approach to urban planning that was founded in 1898 by Sir Ebenezer Howard in the United Kingdom. Garden cities were intended to be planned, self-contained, communities surrounded by greenbelts, containing carefully balanced areas of residences, industry, and agriculture.

Inspired by the Utopian novel Looking Backward, Howard published To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1898 (which was reissued in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow). His idealised garden city would house 32,000 people on a site of 6,000 acres (24,000,000 m2), planned on a concentric pattern with open spaces, public parks and six radial boulevards, 120 ft (37 m) wide, extending from the centre. The garden city would be self-sufficient and when it reached full population, a further garden city would be developed nearby. Howard envisaged a cluster of several garden cities as satellites of a central city of 50,000 people, linked by road and rail.[1]

Smaller developments were also inspired by the garden city movement. Two notable examples in London being Hampstead Garden Suburb and the 'Exhibition Estate' in Gidea Park. The Gidea Park estate in particular was built in two main bursts of activity, 1911, and 1934. Both gave birth to some fine examples of domestic architecture, by such luminaries as Welles Coates and Berthold Lubetkin. Thanks to strongly conservative local residents associations like the Civic Society both Hampstead and Gidea Park retain much of their original character.

Howard organized the Garden City Association in 1899. Two garden cities (towns, actually) were founded on Howard's ideas: Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City, both in Hertfordshire, England. Howard's successor as chairman of the Garden City Association was Sir Frederic Osborn, who extended the movement to regional planning.[2]

The idea of the garden city was influential in the United States. Examples are: the Woodbourne neighborhood of Boston; Newport News, Virginia's Hilton Village; Pittsburgh's Chatham Village; Garden City, New York; Sunnyside, Queens; Jackson Heights, Queens; Forest Hills Gardens, also in the borough of Queens, New York; Radburn, New Jersey; Norris, Tennessee; and Baldwin Hills Village in Los Angeles. In Canada, the Ontario towns of Kapuskasing and Walkerville are, in part, garden cities, and, in Argentina, so is Ciudad Jardín Lomas del Palomar. The first German garden city, Hellerau, a suburb of Dresden, was founded in 1909. Scandinavian examples include the garden city of Bromma in Stockholm, built between 1910 and 1940, including the internationally-acclaimed functionalist garden-city area of Södra Ängby.

The concept was adopted for German worker housing built during the Weimar years, and again in England after World War II, when the New Towns Act triggered the development of many new communities based on Howard's egalitarian vision. The garden-city movement also influenced the Scottish urbanist, Sir Patrick Geddes, in the planning of Tel-Aviv, Israel in the 1920s, during the British Mandate. Geddes started his Tel Aviv plan in 1925 and submitted the final version in 1927, so all growth in this garden city during the 1930s was merely "based" on the Geddes Plan. Changes were inevitable.[3]

Contemporary town-planning charters like New Urbanism and Principles of Intelligent Urbanism find their origins in this movement. Today, there are many garden cities in the world. Most of them, however, exist as just dormitory suburbs, which completely differ from what Howard set out to create.

The Town and Country Planning Association recently marked its 108th anniversary by calling for Garden City and Garden Suburb principles to be applied to today's New Towns and Eco-towns in the United Kingdom.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Goodall, B. (1987) The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography. London: Penguin.
  2. ^ History of the TCPA 1899-1999
  3. ^ Webberley, Helen: Town-planning in a Brand New City, AAANZ Conference, Brisbane, 2008 and see http://melbourneblogger.blogspot.com/.

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