from Architectural Review, June 1978
Eighty years ago
Ebenezer Howard published his visionary essay Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898).
In
1902 Letchworth, the first garden city, was founded. The 75th
anniversary of the first twentieth century British new town provides the
occasion for the publication of five articles exploring the creative
impact of garden city thinking in four countries: Germany, France,
Russia and Britain.
Editors frequently strain credulity by
insisting that all of their contributions-despite appearances to the
contrary-are in fact saying the same thing. In this case no such claim
is made. However, one unifying factor may well prove to be that most of
the contributions will raise the eyebrows of right-thinking garden city
partisans. The notion that Ernst May's Frankfurt housing (long claimed
for the Modern Movement), the flattened blocks of the Paris satellite
towns and Greater Moscow, or the estates built during the Great War to
house British munitions workers could be presented as products-even
by-products-of the garden city may well be regarded as provocative.
Whatever may be said about the need to modify Howard's ideas to the
requirements of public housing schemes at home and abroad, we shall
almost certainly be accused of chronicling the misapplication and
misunderstanding of his prospectus.
Howard's vision of the garden
city projected a view of a total environment and a new urban society.
The garden city was to be limited in size to 6000 acres; the city itself
to occupy 1 000 acres, the rest of the land being given over to
industry and agriculture. The population was to be limited to 32 000
inhabitants. Intended to compensate the, squalor and social alienation
of the big city as well as the deficiencies of rural life, the garden
city was to be autonomous and would incorporate all types and conditions
of people. Industry would be located on the periphery of the built-up
area, encircled by a 'green girdle' of farm land. The residential areas
would be, sub-divided into six wards, or neighbourhoods. Land was to be
owned, developed and controlled on a communal basis. [Toward thus saw
the garden city in social, economic and political, terms 'social city'
as he termed it-and perhaps for the first time articulated a direct link
between all of these factors and the physical environment.
Individually, each component of Howard's , proposal had its precedent in
a tradition of utopian literature that extended to the Renaissance, and
beyond. Howard selected from this tradition to compose what he himself
called a 'unique combination of proposals'.
The idea was
propagated and exploited by a unique combination of sponsors: social
reformers, industrialists, philanthropists, politicians, literati,
architects, do-gooders, temperance campaigners and all manner of
faddist. Given the heterogeneous nature of its membership, it was
remarkable that the garden city movement adhered as closely as it did to
Howard's proposals.
Letchworth, despite a slow start and chronic
under-capitalisation, eventually vindicated the founder's belief in the
practicability of a socially-mixed residential and working community
founded on cooperative (later municipal) enterprise. But later
developments had progressively less revolutionary objectives. At
Hampstead there was no attempt to provide a commercial, still less an
industrial base. The project was planned as a multi-class residential
suburb, but never achieved social balance.
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