The Garden City Movement

By the end of the nineteenth century, the great industrial cities had become, for many of their inhabitants, places of overcrowding, pollution and squalor. Rapid growth had packed enormous numbers of people into cramped and unhealthy housing, often close to the smoking factories where they worked. At the same time, the countryside beyond the cities was emptying as people left the land in search of work. It was against this background that an Englishman named Ebenezer Howard put forward a bold proposal for a new kind of settlement that would combine the best of town and country while avoiding the worst of each.

Howard set out his ideas in an influential book published near the end of the century. He argued that neither the crowded, dirty city nor the quiet but economically stagnant countryside offered a good life on its own. The city provided work, society and opportunity, but at the cost of poor health and grim surroundings; the country offered fresh air and natural beauty, but little employment or social life. Howard's solution was to create settlements that would marry the advantages of both, offering the economic opportunities of the town within a healthy, green environment. He called this new kind of settlement the garden city.

The garden city, as Howard envisaged it, was to be carefully planned and limited in size. Rather than being allowed to sprawl outward indefinitely as existing cities did, it would be built to a fixed plan for a set number of inhabitants, and once it reached its intended size, growth would be accommodated by founding a new city nearby rather than by expanding the old one. In this way each city could remain compact and manageable, and its residents would never be far from open country.

A defining feature of the design was the belt of open land that was to surround each city. This ring of countryside, kept permanently free from building, would provide space for farming and recreation and would prevent the city from merging into its neighbours. The green belt, as this surrounding land came to be known, ensured that the benefits of the countryside remained within easy reach of every inhabitant and set a firm limit to the city's physical spread.

Howard's vision was also concerned with how such a city would be owned and paid for. He proposed that the land on which a garden city stood should be held in common on behalf of the community rather than by private landlords. As the city grew and the value of the land rose, the resulting increase in value would benefit the community as a whole and could be used to fund public services, rather than enriching private owners. In this way the prosperity generated by the city would be shared among its people.

Howard did not merely write about his ideas but worked to put them into practice. With the support of others who shared his vision, a company was formed and land was acquired to build the first garden city, which was begun in the early years of the twentieth century a short distance from London. A second garden city followed some years later. These pioneering settlements attracted great interest and served as practical demonstrations of the principles Howard had described, showing that a planned community of the kind he imagined could actually be built.

The influence of the garden city movement extended far beyond these first experiments. Planners and reformers in many countries were inspired by Howard's ideas, and elements of his thinking were adopted in the design of new towns, suburbs and housing developments around the world. Not everything was carried out as he had intended, and many places that borrowed the label 'garden' adopted the leafy appearance of his cities without their underlying principles of planning and common ownership. Nevertheless, the basic ideals of combining town and country and of planning settlements as coherent wholes proved enormously influential.

The legacy of the movement can still be seen today, both in the surviving garden cities themselves and in the wider practice of town planning that it helped to shape. Ideas that Howard championed, such as limiting urban sprawl, preserving green space around cities and designing communities deliberately rather than letting them grow haphazardly, have become part of the standard vocabulary of planning. In seeking a remedy for the ills of the industrial city, the garden city movement helped to establish the very idea that the growth of cities could and should be consciously guided for the good of those who live in them.