Bookworming: Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow

For most people in the English-speaking world modern town planning (i.e. city and country planning as we know it now) started with the publication in 1898 of To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform by Ebenezer Howard. This book in the utopian tradition of the late nineteenth century describes an idealised place to live that marries the advantages of living in an urban environment (work and facilities) with the merits of country living (sense of community, clean air, connection with nature). This Garden City became truly popular after the 1902 reissue of the book as Garden Cities of To-Morrow coupled with the already established Garden City Association, founded by Howard in 1899. Howard envisaged clusters of Garden City satellites around existing (industrial) cities separated by a green belt of (semi)rural land with road and rail links between them.

Brett Clark, in his Introduction to Howard's Garden Cities of To-Morrow (2003) formulates it well: 'Ebenezer Howard advocated the construction of garden cities to reduce the alienation of human society from nature. The social world was to be reorganized and integrated into the surrounding environment to ensure sustainable interactions. In Garden Cities of To-morrow, Howard provided an outline of a garden city that promised a clean environment, free from air and water pollution, and an abundance of parks and open spaces. Social production was organized for local demands with the goal of creating self-sustaining communities, thus reducing the need for long-distance trade. Howard insisted that the long-term sustainability of garden cities was founded on abiding by the law of restitution, where all wastes were recycled back to the soil to ensure the continued productive potential of the land. In this, Howard's garden cities dissolved the divide between town and country and provided a model for an ecologically sustainable society.'

The title page of the 1902 edition reproduced here. In the middle Robert Beever's critical biography of Ebenezer Howard. The well-illustrated book on Letchworth by Mervyn Miller.

The book with many schematic illustrations has been an inspiration to many in many different countries, but each times the ideas were appropriated. Even Ebenezer Howard didn't manage to create true Garden Cities fully compliant with his ideals. Only two official Garden Cities were realised in England. Both Letchworth Garden City (1903) and Welwyn Garden City (1920) lack several essential elements, most prominently the communal ownership of the living environment, reinvestment of revenues into the local community and the absence of private landlords.

Much has been made of the illustrations in this seminal book. Some have tried to adopt these as the intended representations of the spatial design for such suburban satellites. I feel they were intended however more as organisational representations. The book is full of such lists and schematics to prove the point that such an ideal should and indeed could be realised. They are more organisational in nature than proposed layouts. The writer we must remember wasn't a design professional, but a clerk (making him the opposite of Camillo Sitte).

Two of the famous schematic representations included in Garden Cities of To-Morrow. On the left the Three Magnets representing the pull factors of town,  country and town-country (the garden city). On the right an organisational drawing showing the garden city suburban satellites that would be part of a future based on cooperative socialism.

Howard drew from various contemporary sources for his ideas. He never actively looked beyond Britain and the USA for inspiration. He turned to the American poets Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to the work of Henry George (Progress and Poverty, 1879) and dr. Benjamin Ward Richardson (Hygeia, or the City of Health, 1867) for inspiration. Many consider the time he spent in America -as an unsuccessful pioneer- as pivotal. Howard grew-up and lived in the city all his life. He left London for America only to return few years later. That city -or rather Greater London- grew rapidly during the nineteenth century. The growth of metropolitan areas all over Britain lead to the depopulation of rural areas around them. People found themselves in often dismal conditions in these expanding industrial cities.

Ebenezer Howard joined a debating society (the Zetetical Society) and thus came into contact with the ideas of freethinkers, preachers, prophets of change and progress, reformers and revolutionaries. Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward (1888) inspired him to want to write his ideas down himself. He produced a hybrid utopian novel that also wanted to demonstrate the feasibility of what was proposed (he was after all a political clerk) as he saw the need for radical reform, notably in housing, employment and industrial policy in general.

Through his contacts Howard was introduced to the ideas of the Co-operative Housing Movement. This was the English branch of the co-operative movements that sprang up in both North-America and continental Europe -notably in Germany as Baugenossenschaften. In England the rapid growth of the co-operative movement can be directly linked to the Rochdale Principles, a set of ideals for a co-op formulated by the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844. The ideal of co-operative housing was first realised in Brentham Garden Suburb in Ealing, west London, in 1901. Despite the name this housing project isn't an offshoot from the Garden City Movement, but like Bedford Park (1877) it served as an inspiration for it. In that same year -1901- Ebenezer Howard managed to persuade Ralph Neville, chairman of the Labour Association to chair the Garden City Association. He introduced Howard to the wealthy backers of the Co-operative Movement, notably the Liberal MP Henry Vivian, who had already invested in the Ealing project. In 1903 Howard had secured financiers for Letchworth Garden City. Thus the utopian vision could take shape and become a reality!