A hundred years of town planning and the influence of Ebenezer Howard

by Max Steuer

The Garden City Association, now the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA), was founded on the 10th of June 1899 by a group of men hoping to create a new way of living. They were led by Ebenezer Howard, the author of To-morrow! A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. Originally the TCPA planned to celebrate its centenar y by publishing a new edition of Howard’s book. Instead, the Association’s Chairman, Sir Peter Hall, and its former Environmental Education OfŽ cer, Colin Ward, have produced a commemorative volume in two parts. The Ž rst part consists of a detailed and interesting history of the life and works of Ebenezer Howard, and the inuence of his and related ideas on town planning during the past centur y. The second part of the book is a chronicle of Hall and Ward’s ideas about the best way to accommodate the proposed building of new houses in the UK over the next few decades. Not surprisingly, the authors want to show that Howard’s thinking is relevant to current housing and town planning issues. They struggle to do so, sometimes making big claims for Howard, and at other times getting on with their own ideas and leaving Howard to one side. This book is a pivotal publication which is intended to celebrate the achievements of the town planning movement. The centenary means one thing to the members of the town planning establishment, and quite another thing to outsiders, like myself, who come from the social science tradition.
Hall and Ward describe Howard’s life prior to writing Tomorrow!, later republished as Garden Cities of To-Morrow, as, ‘one of hard grind and personal failure’ (p. 4). Howard emigrated to America, where he tried unsuccessfully to make a go of farming. When disaster struck, he was able to rescue his family and earn a ver y modest living by moving to Chicago and working as a shorthand writer. He returned to London in 1876 and carried on with shorthand as a Parliamentary reporter. He had no particular educational background, but always took an interest in social movements, rejecting most, but being rather drawn to the economist Henry George and his single land tax. Howard appears to have been a decent enough fellow with something of a gift for orator y. He hardly seems to be the kind of person who would write a book which, in Hall and Ward’s phrase, ‘would change the course of history’.

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Letschworth Garden City

Letschworth Garden City

Letschworth Garden City

more about Ebenezer Howard and Garden City:

INTRODUCTION: THE GARDEN CITY LEGACY

From Garden Cities to New Towns – An Integrative Planning Solution?

History of Letchworth Garden City

Howard Park and Howard Garden, Letchworth Garden City, Herts: Archaeological Desk Based Assessment

The Roots and Origins of New Urbanism

What is Green Urbanism? Holistic Principles to Transform Cities for Sustainability

URBAN PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL TERRITORY, CANBERRA: A CRITICAL REVIEW

by BUNNARITH MENG

Urban planning plays an important role in shaping a city. Without prior or appropriate planning, the city may grow or change in an uncontrollable way due to population and social, economic and environmental changes. Such changes are of course fundamental in planning.
In Canberra—the Australian National Capital—the history of development and planning has experienced subsequent changes over time since its formulation. Walter Burley Griffin—the Town Planner for Canberra—created this city on a basis of a Land and Water Axis principle, which is, at present, still the basic concept for the development. Whether the urban planning history of Canberra makes a positive or negative contribution to its development, a number of key factors are taken into consideration in this paper as follows:

Watson, Canberra, 1965

First of all, I will briefly trace the history of the Capital City followed by an introduction to planning concepts of the winning design. Secondly, the main focus of this paper, I will argue that the planning and development of Canberra with regard to certain issues such as land use planning and transportation planning and its associates and urban consolidation have so far brought both positive and negative outcomes; and finally, I will draw a conclusion stating my own judgments on the planning implementation followed by an opinion.

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Canberra Plan of the City & Environs - September 1918

Plan of Canberra, 1940

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Skyline photos of Melbourne, Australia (1)

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Challenges to Urban Transport Sustainability and Smart Transport in a Tourist City: The Gold Coast, Australia

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INTRODUCTION: THE GARDEN CITY LEGACY

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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Letworth Garden City, by skenmy

 

more about Garden City:

From Garden Cities to New Towns – An Integrative Planning Solution?

A Garden City Without A Garden!

The history of British and Irish towns

From Garden Cities to New Towns – An Integrative Planning Solution?

by Chris Gossop

From their foundation in the form of the two garden cities of Letchworth and Welwyn at the start of the twentieth century, the British new towns are now a well established part of planning history. It is perhaps surprising, though, to realise that Milton Keynes, the largest of them, and one of the last to be set up, was designated 40 years ago. So, are the British new towns just history or do they have a continuing relevance?
This paper first traces the evolution of the new towns concept, from the formulation of the garden cities idea by Ebenezer Howard, to the programme of Government new towns that followed the Second World War (WWII). It next seeks to highlight some of the lessons of this experience and then to provide a personal verdict on the successes and failures of these new communities.
An underlying question is whether the new towns achieved Howard’s vision for garden cities as well as the wider regional development aims of Government? Related to that is whether they have become successful places in which to live and work. Following the Congress theme, has Howard’s inclusive vision been realised – have the new towns proved to be an integrative solution?
In its final section, the paper explores the ways in which the new town idea has been taken forward in the United Kingdom. After a lengthy period during which it was given too little importance, the regional planning - of which the new towns were a product - is once more a priority. In the south east of East of England, four major growth areas are now being pursued through a range of mechanisms. One of these will involve a substantial expansion of Milton Keynes and there are roles for other new towns too. The paper concludes with a brief look at the plan for Northstowe, a proposed new settlement near Cambridge.

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queen's court, the centre, milton keynes, england, 1973-1979, by seier+seier

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History of Letchworth Garden City

Staff Houses and Garden Cities: The Influence of the Pulp and Paper Industry on Newfoundland’s Built Heritage

Assessment of Garden City Planning Principles in the ACT

Howard Park and Howard Garden, Letchworth Garden City, Herts: Archaeological Desk Based Assessment

History of Letchworth Garden City

via First Garden City Heritage Museum

In 1898 a small book was published that was to have an effect all over the world. This book, entitled ‘Tomorrow A Peaceful path To Real Reform’, led to the building of two Garden Cities, inspired similar developments world-wide and set a precedent in new standards for urban environments that is still in use today.

The author was Ebenezer Howard, a shorthand writer and social reformer, who believed that he had the solution to the problems of the uncontrolled growth of towns and the migration of people from the countryside to the towns seeking jobs and homes.

By the late 19th century, towns and cities in this country - and in many of the industrialised nations - were overcrowded, polluted by factories and workshops and by the smoke from the coal fires of houses. Many people were living in slum housing and the quality of life for the poorest people, in particular, was almost indescribably bad.

In the countryside, life was often no better with many people out of work and living in houses that were as deficient as the worst houses found in the towns. Many agricultural workers and their families were forced to leave the country for the towns where they hoped to find jobs and houses. In fact, for many people life in the towns was just as difficult as the life they had left behind them.

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Urban Planning and the British New Right

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Assessment of Garden City Planning Principles in the ACT

Staff Houses and Garden Cities: The Influence of the Pulp and Paper Industry on Newfoundland’s Built Heritage

by Andrea O’Brien

When most people think of heritage buildings they call to mind stately, elaborate homes in historic city districts, impressive stone churches or quaint country estates. There also exists the notion that buildings must be old to be considered heritage places, with an ideal vintage falling somewhere around the one hundred year mark. These ideas of what constitutes a heritage place sometimes discount sites that have made an impact on the history and development of more modern towns and cities.

On the island of Newfoundland, where the cultural, social and economic focus was historically

on the sea, heritage structures associated with a way of life detached from fishing have in the past been viewed as modern interlopers on a much older, purer tradition. Yet a large part of the province’s history and its economic evolution revolves around the establishment of several industrial operations in the early 1900s, relatively recent developments in comparison to centuries of settlement along the island’s east coast. These industries, particularly pulp and paper operations, opened up the previously undeveloped interior of the island and were the impetus for building a railway link between the east and west coasts. They also resulted in the construction of new towns established with an eye to the future - an ideal reflected in the built heritage of these places.

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A Garden City Without A Garden!

The history of British and Irish towns

Assessment of Garden City Planning Principles in the ACT

Howard Park and Howard Garden, Letchworth Garden City, Herts: Archaeological Desk Based Assessment

A Garden City Without A Garden!

via The Sunday Leader

A recent report of the Economist Intelligence Unit of the 168-year-old Economist magazine would have rudely shattered the dreams of those visionaries of making Sri Lanka the ‘Asian Miracle’ with its capital, Colombo, as the ‘Garden City of Asia’. After conducting a global survey on basic criteria essential for good living, the Economic Intelligence Unit declared that Colombo was among the ‘Worst Ten Livable Cities’ in the world’. The other cities conferred this dishonour are: Dakar (Senegal), Douala (Cameroon), Lagos (Nigeria), Port Moresby (Papua New Guinea), Dhaka (Bangladesh), Harare (Zimbabwe), Karachi (Pakistan), Tehran (Iran) and Algiers (Algeria).

other day we were being told that our capital would once again be the ‘Garden City of Asia’ with the construction of Chinese Shangri-La’s in the Galle Face environs along with other tourist attractions. Being a citizen of Colombo and its environs for long years we certainly wish that our city  ranks as a Garden City of Asia but all of us should not be carried away by the euphoria and tourism blurbs of propagandists, determined to please their masters, ignoring stark realities.

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Colombo, Sri Lanka, photo by whl.travel

A transportation center in Colombo, photo by olaf.kellerhoff

Colombo, by LeeLeFever

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The history of British and Irish towns

via Researching Historic Buildings in the British Isles

A town is not just an overgrown village. It has its own economy. Goods are made and traded there. So a good site might be on a bend in a navigable river, or beside a river crossing.

The development of towns is generally complex. In those of our historic towns not too mangled by Blitz or boom, you can trace the growth from medieval core through belts of Georgian, Victorian and modern buildings, almost like tree rings. Check your conclusions with a series of town maps. The date and magnificence of churches, public buildings and places of entertainment give other clues to the periods of greatest prosperity. 

City status in England and Wales was traditionally given to towns with cathedrals, but from 1888 size of population became the chief factor in such designations.

Roman

In the 1st century BC a few tribal centres (oppida) grew up in southern Britain, though only one appears truly urban - Calleva (Silchester). Some became Roman district capitals - Canterbury, Silchester, St Albans and Winchester. Other district capitals, such as Carmarthen, Carlisle, Cirencester, Exeter and Wroxeter perhaps replaced a tribal meeting-place nearby, but as towns they were Roman creations, as was London, capital of the new province of Britannia. Other towns began life as legionary fortresses with settlements of ex-soldiers, like Caerleon, Chester, Gloucester, Lincoln and York, while Bath and Buxton were Roman spas. Roman towns were laid out on a grid plan and in the 4th century AD many gained defenses. Bibliography. 

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The Picton Monument, Carmarthen, Wales, photo by loscuadernosdejulia

Town Wall of Carmarthe, photo by Rogue Soul

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HISTORY OF CITY PLANNING – PARIS (1850-1920)

Assessment of Garden City Planning Principles in the ACT

Andrew Ward

Freestone in Model Communities The Garden City Movement in Australia provides a useful summary of the origins of the Garden City Movement: The garden city tradition of planning takes its name from the work of Ebenezer Howard, who in Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898) advanced the idea of garden cities as a vehicle towards ‘ a better and brighter civilization’. He called for a ‘social revolution’ but few of his supporters went this far. The political complexion of the garden city movement which developed in Britain in the early twentieth century was far more moderate, its agenda far more eclectic. The central concern was not the decentralised, cooperative society envisaged by Howard, but the improvement of the urban environment. The most remarkable applications of ‘garden city principles’ were two completely new environments – the garden cities of Letchworth (1904) and Welwyn (1920). Industrial housing estates, some like Cadbury Brothers’ Bournville actually predating Howard’s work, embodied the same ideas. The most widespread and enduring expression of garden city design standards was in the suburbs. Whitehand and Carr, however, look further back in their search for the origins of garden city planning in England to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They state that the single family house in its private garden as opposed to the Georgian ‘square’ of terrace houses around a communal garden became fashionable for the middle classes rich enough to afford it during this period. They were looking to the country houses of the aristocracy and the gentry for their exemplars and it should be borne in mind that private land in the pedestrian city would have been a scarce commodity. In the absence of mechanized transport, the time was not yet right for the garden city. Nevertheless, the 1810s saw a garden suburb developed by the aristocratic Calthorpe to the south-west of Birmingham. Such low density development, however, would have been an exception to the main stream which was still very logically characterized by terraces and row houses.
It was not until the 1870s that individually designed dwellings arranged as terraces were used at Bedford Park, just beyond the western fringes of London. Soon, detached and semi-detached houses were overwhelmingly predominant. Richard Norman (1831- 1912), the eminent architect and urban designer, best remembered for his adaptation of eighteenth century styles that he called “Queen Anne”, laid out Bedford Park in 1876. His scheme was exceptional as one of the first garden suburbs and unusual also in architectural terms, for Shaw’s work was highly influential, finding its way to Australia by the late 1880s and seen in modified form at Haberfield in Sydney. Bourneville’s importance lay not so much in its early date (c.1879) but in the diffusion of the garden suburb form down the social hierarchy to the working class. The first houses were semidetached in garden surrounds, forming the genesis of a larger garden suburb, the influence of which had become pervasive in Bournville, as it had elsewhere, by the Great War.
Barry Parker (1867-1947) and Raymond Unwin (1863-1940), who practiced jointly as architects and planners and undertook the design of Letchworth, received their first commission in 1901 when the chocolate magnate, Joseph Rowntree, retained them to prepare a scheme for the accommodation of workers at New Earswick, near York, England. They aimed to reduce the amount of expensive roads needed to give access to all houses and to give each house a pleasant garden and view.

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Letchworth Garden City, photo by alex drennan

Letchworth Garden City, by Gregory Williams

Letchworth Garden City, by G Travels

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Towards garden city wonderlands: new town planning in 1950s Taiwan

Howard Park and Howard Garden, Letchworth Garden City, Herts: Archaeological Desk Based Assessment

Towards garden city wonderlands: new town planning in 1950s Taiwan

by Yi-Wen Wang and Tim Heath

This article explores the historical context, process and result of introducing and implementing 'new' town planning in early post-war Taiwan. The two so-called 'garden cities' are examined: Jhong-Sing New Village and Yonghe City, both of which were formulated in the mid-1950s by the same group of local planners. It reveals that the assumed necessity of importing Western planning paradigms arose from the abrupt escalation of urban concentration caused by the late 1940s mass migrations from China. To cope with this unprecedented population growth, planning profession was swiftly established. The novice planners, in search of a reference for developing 'new' towns to decentralise excessive urbanisation, modelled their 'new' town planning on English suburban morphology. In the absence of an input of external expertise, the planners appeared to mistake aesthetic order and pastoral imagery of low-density residential development in England as practically viable solutions to the pressing urban problems in Taiwan. In a false hope that adopting Western ideas and practices would quickly lead the island to a better world, Taiwan initiated the importation of planning paradigms. This planning transfer not only evidently manifests a mode of 'borrowing' in post-colonial countries in international diffusion but also re-articulates the disseminating nature of modern planning and the existence of one-direction flows characterising the global dynamics of diffusion in the twentieth century. 

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Yonghe City, Taiwan, photo by delcond

Urban Taiwan, photo by delcond

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Howard Park and Howard Garden, Letchworth Garden City, Herts: Archaeological Desk Based Assessment

Keith J Fitzpatrick-Matthews
North Hertfordshire District Council Museums Service
Archaeology Report 35

Introduction

This assessment of the archaeology of Howard Park and Howard Garden was commissioned on 10 April 2008 by Keith Gayner of North Hertfordshire District Council as part of a Stage 2 submission for Heritage Lottery Funding. The study area is bounded to the west by Norton Way South, to the North by Birds Hill, to the east by Rushby Mead and to the south by Pixmore Way. This report is based purely on existing documentation in the public domain, personal knowledge of the site and its surroundings from the early 1960s to the present, and a detailed site inspection undertaken in April 2008. No original fieldwork was undertaken beyond the site inspection and no original documents held in archives outside North Hertfordshire Museums Service were consulted.

Letchworth Garden City
 

Geology

Letchworth Garden City lies on deposits of Cretaceous chalk, the Lower Chalk formation in lower- lying parts of the town and Middle Chalk on the higher ground (Figure 2). The study area straddles the boundary between the two. The element of the Lower Chalk found in this area has been termed Grey Chalk, occasionally overlain by a thin deposit of Plenus Marl. The former contains frequent marine fossils, especially of pycnodonteine oysters, while the latter appears to have formed in shallow waters with an abundant macrofaunal fossil assemblage (Hopson et al.1996, 34). These are likely to be the deposits underlying the north-western part of the study area. Above them, the Middle Chalk is represented by Melbourn Rock, an off-white chalk with few fossils (Hopson et al.1996, 43). This is the deposit underlying the south-eastern part of the study area. The Lower Chalk and Grey Clay are impervious and their outcropping at the foot of the hills to the south-east cause springs to form; one of these, Pix Brook, and its tributaries, flows through the centre of Letchworth Garden City and forms the eastern boundary of the study area (Miller 2002, 27).
During the Quaternary, the valley of the Pix Brook was occupied by a river draining south from the Midlands via Stevenage in a palaeochannel known as the Stevenage Channel. The initial advance of the Anglian ice sheet (beginning around 480,000 BP) was through this valley, which was gradually broadened to the west, forming the Hitchin Gap. An early retreat of the glacier left a proglacial lake south of Letchworth Garden City, but the site remained under the glacier (Hopson et al. 1996, 100). The ice sheet was up to a kilometre thick and eroded as much as 70 m or so from the former land surface. Deposits left after its retreat have been classified in the Thames Catchment subgroup of the Britannia Catchments Group (McMillan 2005, 98).
In parts of the valley of the Pix Brook, deposits of a neogene calcareous tufa have been observed (for instance, at Norton Common). It is deposited above the till deposits around three metres above the stream and contains species of mollusca known to have been extinct by about 4000 BP (Hopson et al. 1996, 110). It is not known if these deposits are present in the study area.

read the report here

Letchworth, image by stevecadman

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