[URBAN NOTE] Slate on the genesis of the garden city

[rfmcdonald]

Slate hosts Sarah Laskow's post "These Utopian City Maps Have Influenced Urban Planners for Over a Century", from Atlas Obscura, on the genesis of the concept of the garden city.

At the end of the 19th century, cities in Europe and the United States were growing wildly. They were dirty, noisy, and cramped, and most of the people who lived in their tight quarters had no way to escape, even for the weekend.

Ebenezer Howard's Garden City was meant to solve those problems. Instead of cities expanding like ooze over the Earth, he imagined planned cities that grew in organized buds. They would be large enough to support industry, small enough so that access to work, school, play, and nature would be easy, and all interconnected by a network of roads and rails.

Howard was inspired by the utopian vision in Edward Bellamy's 1888 sci-fi novel Looking Backward, in which the United States has transformed over time into a working socialist system. Though his plan fell far short of Bellamy's vision, Howard imagined that the land of his Garden Cities would be cooperatively owned and rents could stay low. The most striking feature of his plan, though, was how each city would provide everything its citizens might need.

Howard laid out his Garden City in concentric circles. Each city, he imagined, would take up 6,000 acres of land and house 32,000 people. The city itself would take up one-sixth of that space; the surrounding land would be dedicated to farms and certain civic institutions, including retirement homes.

At the center of the city there would be a vast park, ringed by a Crystal Palace containing shops and a winter garde, and edged by the city's museum, hospital, and other institutions. Past the center, houses would line six radiating boulevards and a series of circular avenues. The residential areas of the city would be divided into the two main bands. In between, a a ring park would add green space and host the city's schools and playgrounds. The outer ring of the city would be devoted to industry, with the railroad running right along the edge.