From Garden City to Green City: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard

From Garden City to Green City

CENTER BOOKS ON CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE DESIGN Frederick R. Steiner Consulting Editor George F. Thompson Series Founder and Director Published in cooperation with the Center for American Places, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Harrisonburg, Virginia

F r o m t o

G a r d e n

G r e e n

C i t y

T h e Legacy of Ebenezer

Edited

C i t y

Howard

by

K e r m i t C .

Parsons

and D a v i d

Schuyler

T h e J o h n s Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London

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© 2002 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2002 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data From garden city to green city: the legacy of Ebenezer Howard / Kermit C. Parsons, David Schuyler, editors. p. cm. — (Center books on contemporary landscape design) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8018-6944-7

1. Howard Ebenezer, Sir, 1850-1928. To-morrow. 2. Garden cities. 3. City planning. I. Parsons, Kermit C. (Kermit Carlyle), 1927- II. Schuyler, David. III. Series. HTI6I .F76 2002

307.i'2i6—dc2i

List ofIllustrations Acknowledgments

2001007421

IX xiii

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Introduction David Schuyler 1

Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times Stephen V. Ward

H

2

Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes: Two Approaches to City Development Pierre Clavel

38

3

The Bounded City Robert Fishman

58

4

Greenbelts in City and Regional Planning Robert Freestone

67

viii

Contents 5

6

7

8

The Origins of the Garden City Residential Neighborhood Mervyn Miller British and American Community Design: Clarence Stein's Manhattan Transfer, 1924-1974 Kermit C. Parsons The Garden Suburb and the New Urbanism William Fulton Five Generations of the Garden City: Tracing Howard's Legacy in Twentieth-Century Residential Planning

99 Illustrations

131

!59

171

Eugenie L. Birch 9

10

Green Cities and the Urban Future Robert F. Young

201

The Howard Legacy Stephen V. Ward

222

Notes List of Contributors Index

2

45 275 277

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

The Master Key The Social City The Three Magnets diagram, first known version The Three Magnets diagram, typescript of To-morrow The Three Magnets diagram, published version of To-morrow Ward & Centre Garden City Cover of Garden Cities of To-morrow Board of Directors of Letchworth Cover of New Towns after the War Early promotional material for Welwyn Garden City Ebenezer Howard Patrick Geddes Geddes's diagram of the valley section Geddes's diagram depicting the relationship of town, city, school, and cloister Patrick Abercrombie's Greater London Plan

21 22 24 25 26 27 29 31 34 35 3<5 39 46 48 80

» Illustrations i6 17 18 J

9 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3° 3i 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Oxford, England, from across the city's greenbelt Thomas Adams' plan for green wedges The regional city Plan of the "Bay Circuit" greenway system, Boston Vancouver's Green Zone A theoretical demonstration of an urban growth boundary The Social City revisited Blaise Hamlet, Bristol Bournville Village green and shops A plan of a village green by Raymond Unwin Quadrangles of cooperative dwellings for a Yorkshire town, designed by Unwin An illustration from Unwin's Cottage Plans and Common Sense Plan of New Earswick Plan for Letchworth Westholm Green Garden City Tenants' housing scheme, Pixmore "The Artisans' Quarter," Hampstead Garden Suburb "Definitive" layout of "the Artisans' Quarter" Linnell Close, Hampstead Garden Suburb Reynolds Close, Hampstead Garden Suburb Plan of Reynolds Close Unwin's block diagrams in Nothing Gained by Overcrowding Plan of Brentham, Ealing, West London Marino Garden Village, Dublin Welwyn Garden City layout plan Guessens Walk Plan of Radburn, New Jersey Barry Parker's version of the neighborhood superblock Plan of northwest and southwest residential districts, Radburn A typical block, Sunnyside Gardens, New York Plan of town center, Stevenage New Town Design for Queen's Park Estate, Wrexham, Wales

Illustrations 81 85 87 89 92 95 96 IOI 104 106 107 108 no III 112 "3 114 116 117 118 119 121 122 123 126 127 128 129 134 136 140 I41

48 49 50 5! 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 61 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 7i 72 73 74 75 76

Plan of Greenhill-Bradway, Sheffield Welsh Farm Estate, Stourport Plan of Willenhall Wood, Coventry Elm Green Estate, Stevenage Jackmans Estate, Letchworth Detail of Carbrain area, Cumbernauld Plan of the center of Reston, Virginia, and Lake Anne Village Plan of the center of Columbia, Maryland Clarence Perry's neighborhood unit concept Greenbelt, Maryland Reston, Virginia Sales brochure for Columbia, Maryland Harmon Cove, Secaucus, New Jersey Celebration, Florida Mashpee Commons, Cape Cod Horizon West master plan for villages in Orange County, Florida Lakeside Village, Orange County, Florida Tampines New Town, Singapore Colonel Light Gardens, Mitcham, suburban Adelaide, South Australia Suresnes, Paris Washington New Town Flats at Hulme, Manchester, U.K. Lightmoor, Telford New Town Brownfield renewal in Hulme, Manchester, U.K. Enskede, Stockholm Alby, Stockholm Schungelburg, the older part Schiingelburg, the newly built section Redmond, Seattle

xi 142 143 144 146 147 149 153 156 176 178 180 181 182 187 191 194 196 199 225 226 227 230 232 235 238 240 241 242 243

! '

Acknowledgments

This book was conceived by Kermit C. Parsons, who as director of the Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies at Cornell University organized the conference "From Garden Cities to Green Cities and Beyond: Urban Policy for the Twenty-First Century" and invited the participants whose work is presented in these pages. All authors are indebted to K.C. for the opportunity to present their ideas, for the suggestions he made regarding earlier versions of their essays, and for the friendship he has shown over the years. We are also indebted to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Stein Institute for their financial support of the conference. In poor health and faced with the task of organizing a conference and a book that he hoped would be its permanent contribution to the importance of history for contemporary planning, K.C. called upon two friends. Lawrence C. Gerckens, founder and longtime executive secretary of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH), helped conceptualize the conference, and David Schuyler, then president of SACRPH, coedited the volume of essays. Together, the editors selected the papers to be published and worked with authors in revising their remarks for publication. Others whose efforts were im-

xiv Acknowledgments portant include Michelle Andrews of the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell, who provided indispensable help in organizing the conference, and two talented graduate students, Michelle Thompson and Kristin A. Guild, who assisted her. Since K. C. Parsons' death in December 1999, Jan Parsons has been helpful in dozens of ways, from hunting for illustrations to sharing K.C.'s notes to pro viding generous encouragement. Michael Tomlan, K.C's successor as director of the Stein Institute, deserves special recognition for his role in bringing this volume to completion. He quickly saw the merits of the book we projected, read the introduction in draft and everything else in various stages of completion, answered dozens of questions, and helped us navigate Cornell's administrative structure. Tomlan's student Clay Kelly took time from writing her master's thesis in historic preservation to answer numerous queries, check facts, and help assemble the illustrations. A second Cornell preservation student, Kristin Kowalski, also helped in the final stages of editing. George F. Thompson and the Center for American Places provided essential guidance in selecting and arranging the illustrations and oversaw the publishing process with care and efficiency. The authors are indebted to Lois Cram for her copyediting, which was both thorough and sensitive to our intent; to Wilma Rosenberger, who designed this book; to Kimberly Johnson, our production editor; and to Becky Hornyak, who prepared the index. We are grateful to Taylor and Francis, Ltd., for permission to republish the text and illustrations of K. C. Parsons' essay "British and American Community Design: Clarence Stein's Manhattan Transfer, 1924-74"; to Routledge for permission to publish the portrait of Patrick Geddes and his Valley Plan of Civilization; to Princeton Architectural Press for permission to publish Peter Calthorpe's diagram of an urban growth boundary; and to the following institutions for permission to publish images in their collections: Cornell University Libraries; Dublin Corporation/City Archives; First Garden City Heritage Museum, Letchworth; Hampstead Garden Suburb Collection of the London Metropolitan Archives; Her Majesty's Stationers Office; Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, Hertfordshire County Record Office; Regional Plan Association; Town and Country Planning Association; Unwin Collection, Manchester University; Sir Frederic Osborn Archive; and Welwyn Garden City Library.

F r o m Garden City to Green City

I n t r o d u c t i o n

David Schuyler

Although Ebenezer Howard's To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898) would prove to have a profound effect on the humanly created landscape, the book's initial success undoubtedly surprised both the publisher and the author. Anticipating that sales would fail to cover production costs, Swan Sonnenschein required a subvention to print the book, and Howard betrayed his modest expectations of its commercial value when he failed to copyright his work (and as a result never received royalties). Generally favorable reviews and the formation, in 1899, of the Garden City Association to promote the ideas Howard articulated in To-morrow surely contributed to sales and to the decision to publish an inexpensive paperback edition. By 1900 To-morrow had sold 3,000 copies.1 Howard's book was slightly revised and retitled Garden Cities of To-morrow in 1902. The new edition coincided with the second national conference of the Garden City Association, held in Port Sunlight, William Hesketh Lever's industrial garden village near Liverpool,2 and with the formation of the Garden City Pioneer Company, Ltd., which sought to acquire a site for a new community to be built as a demonstration of the viability of Howard's idea. As interest in the garden city spread around the world, Garden Cities of To-morrow was trans-

2

David Schuyler

lated into several languages, including German, French, Czech, and Russian, and by 1914 there were garden city associations in eleven countries.3 After a lapse of some years, during which time Howard's ideas experienced what Frederic J. Osborn termed "academic neglect," the book was reissued, with a preface by Osborn and an introductory essay by Lewis Mumford, in 1946. Published in paperback by MIT Press in 1965, the Osborn edition of the book has remained in print ever since. In its various editions, To-morrow undoubtedly ranks as one of the best-selling books devoted to city and regional planning in the twentieth century. It has also proved to be one of the most influential. In his essay in the Osborn edition, Mumford wrote: "Garden Cities of To-morrow has done more than any other single book to guide the modern town planning movement and to alter its objectives."4 A century after its publication, historians, architects, and planners are still thinking (and writing) about the issues Howard presented in To-morrow. In the spring of 1998, the Journal of the American Planning Association presented brief essays by seven scholars on aspects of Howard's legacy,5 and in the fall of that year the Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies at Cornell University hosted an international conference focused on Howard, the garden city, and the influence of Howard's ideas on community development and environmental planning on the eve of the twenty-first century. The International Planning History Society recognized Howard's accomplishments and the continuing influence of his ideas by holding its tenth biennial conference in Letchworth Garden City and London in July 2002; in addition, plans are under way to celebrate, in 2003, the centennial of the founding of Letchworth, a community designed by Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker following the principles Howard sketched in To-morrow. But perhaps the best indications of the significance of Howard's accomplishment are what Stephen Ward has termed the "rediscovery and re-examination of the garden city idea" and the resurgence of interest in the kinds of neighborhoods and communities he advocated.6 Although it was a small book written by an exceedingly modest man, To-morrow has influenced individuals, across several generations, deeply concerned with the problems of metropolitan and regional development. Ebenezer Howard's book continues to resonate today. FORALLITS INFLUENCE on the twentieth-century metropolis, To-morrow was

•v shaped by Howard's reaction to the nineteenth-century city. The garden city was Howard's solution to the harsh existence experienced by so many residents of

Introduction London—the density of building and population, the squalid living and working environments, poverty rates that exceeded 40 percent in many of the inner boroughs, the inability of the working class to afford decent dwellings. These conditions, contemporaries recognized, contributed to social unrest and the recurrence of epidemic disease.7 Congregational minister Andrew Mearns' sensational pamphlet The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883), one of the most influential accounts of the late-nineteenth-century city, described the "pestilential human rookeries" and the "rotten and reeking tenements" that inadequately sheltered so many families, as well as the impact of the twin evils of poverty and urban squalor on the physical and moral health of the nation.8 In his introduction to To-morrow, Howard claimed a universality for his concern that "people should continue to stream into the already over-crowded cities," which not only raised congestion in London to ever more intolerable levels but also contributed to the depopulation of rural districts.9 He clearly assumed that his readers would be familiar with the horrors of the Victorian city, because he provided few of the graphic details that characterized Mearns' Bitter Cry of Outcast London or books such as Charles Booth's social surveys of the city, published serially as Life and Labour of the People ofLondon (1892-97), and Jacob Riis's searing indictment of squalid housing and its impact on the poor, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements ofNew York (1890). Only a year after the publication of Howard's book, the American statistician Adna F. Weber confirmed quantitatively what Howard had learned from reading, his walks through London, and frequent conversation with others concerned about contemporary society—that "the most remarkable social phenomenon of the present century is the concentration of population in cities." London, home to 4.5 million residents in 1901, had doubled in population since 1850, though its rate of increase had slowed in the second half of the century as the suburban population increased. Greater London's population surpassed 6.5 million at the turn of the twentieth century, the growth largely the result of migration from the countryside. Weber shared Howard's concern for the environmental consequences of urban congestion—indeed, he documented the degree to which the "lack of pure air, water and sunlight" caused the higher mortality rates in urban centers—and he too believed that the concentration of people in large cities "touches or underlies most of the practical questions of the day."10 Conditions in London and other large cities in Europe and the United States startled many commentators and provoked efforts to find alternatives. Often this took the form of imaginary flights to different times or places where the prob-

4

David Schuyler

lems that weighed so heavily on the present had been solved. During the 1880s and 1890s more than 100 Utopian and dystopian novels were published in Great Britain, and more than 150 books of the same genre appeared in the United States. The English novels included visions of a society in which the world enjoyed peace through international federation, or where women had attained equal rights, or where cooperative commonwealths created a more just and humane economic and social order. A number presented variations on an anarchistsocialist Utopia, or a society in which the state owned all land, or successful communes. A handful of dystopian novels attempted to discredit socialism or cooperation or the idea of the nationalist state, which became enormously popular in the aftermath of the publication of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-188'] (1888). Several of the Utopian novels were published by Swan Sonnenschein, which later brought out Howard's To-morrow.11 Bellamy's Looking Backward was one of the most influential of these Utopian novels, and Howard found it inspiring. Howard later recalled how deeply Looking Backward had affected him by recounting his actions the day after he read it: "I went into some of the crowded parts of London, and as I passed through the narrow dark streets, saw the wretched dwellings in which the majority of the people lived, observed on every hand the manifestations of a self-seeking order of society, and reflected on the absolute unsoundness of our economic system." Looking Backward, he wrote, "permanently convinced me that our present industrial order stands absolutely condemned and is tottering to its fall, and that a new and brighter, because a juster, order must ere long take its place." Although he ultimately considered Bellamy's Utopia too authoritarian and disagreed with its emphasis on the role of the state as a shaper of community life, Howard was deeply influenced by Looking Backward and claimed credit for arranging the publication of the English edition of the book.12 Equally important, the Nationalisation of Labour Society—the English analog of the National Union clubs that organized in the United States to promote the implementation of Bellamy's reformist agenda—strongly supported Howard at a crucial point in the development of the ideas he expressed in To-morrow.u The appeal of books such as Bellamy's went beyond their specific projects for the future to holding out hope for alternatives to present conditions. What historian John Kasson has written about the American outpouring of Utopian novels at the end of the nineteenth century is applicable to the English books •spublished during the same decades: "In a confused and apocalyptic time the form of the Utopian novel offered a mode of interpreting social experience. Such

Introduction fiction exposed the contradictions of contemporary American life, either by contrasting them with an imaginary unified social order, or by extrapolating the chaos that would result if American society continued to develop along existing lines."14 Some critics dismissed To-morrow as Utopian, and like so much of the Utopian literature of the time, Howard's book projected an alternative to the present, an idyllic place that stood in stark juxtaposition to living and working conditions in Victorian London. But whereas most novels located Utopia in a far-off place or time, Howard's garden city would be nearby, in the English countryside, and in the immediate future. His vision, he insisted, was to create new communities that would provide a better quality of life than was possible in a great city. Environmental reform was essential to Howard's conceptualization of the garden city: he chose as the epigraph for the first chapter of To-morrow a passage from John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, which evoked a powerful contrast to the latenineteenth-century metropolis. Ruskin projected a new era characterized by improvements to existing housing, sanitary reform, and the construction of wholesome dwellings located in the countryside. The community he envisioned would consist of houses built "strongly, beautifully, and in groups of limited extent, kept in proportion to their streams and walled round, so that there may be no festering and wretched suburb anywhere, but clean and busy street within and the open country without, with a belt of beautiful garden and orchard round the walls, so that from any part of the city perfectly fresh air and grass and sight of far horizon might be reachable in a few minutes' walk."15 Howard added his own voice to Ruskin's, arguing that there was a remarkable consensus recognizing the need to get people out of cities and to more healthful surroundings in rural areas. Thus Howard proposed a different path, a way of life that promised to alleviate the problems of the Victorian city as well as those of the agricultural countryside, which in most areas of England was suffering from population loss and widespread poverty. His garden city, which combined the advantages of town and country, would spark "the spontaneous movement of the people from our crowded cities to the bosom of our kindly mother earth, at once the source of life, of happiness, of wealth, and of power."16 Attractive though Howard undoubtedly hoped readers would find these passages, he wanted them to see the garden city not as some fanciful Utopia but as a practical, realistic alternative to the present. Utopian novels such as Looking Backward projected a future in which social problems had been eliminated but did not explain the process of social transformation. Bellamy, for example,

r 6

David Schuyler

merely stated that a popular movement had resulted in a cooperative commonwealth that replaced a ruthlessly irresponsible capitalistic system. By contrast, Howard was concerned with achieving real reform, and he went to great lengths to explain how the garden city could become a physical fact. Indeed, most of the book consists of chapters that explain the garden city in words and cost analysis—a kind of road map to implementation—that Howard hoped would convince potential investors of the viability of the scheme.17 Building upon the example of limited dividend companies that erected model housing for the poor and the working classes in England and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, he expected that well-intentioned benefactors would invest in the garden city and accept a lower rate of return on their capital than they might otherwise obtain because of their commitment to the ideals the garden city would help realize.18 Yet, even as he appealed to capitalists, Howard's garden city contained what he hoped would be the roots of a radical social change, the communal ownership of land, which would enable residents to capture the increases in value that resulted from the growth of the community. Drawing in part upon arguments the American reformer Henry George presented in Progress and Poverty (1879), which attributed the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth to unearned increments in the value of urban land, Howard proposed that in future years revenue obtained from higher rents benefit the entire community rather than a handful of individual landowners: the income would amortize the money borrowed to start the garden city and eventually subsidize a whole range of cultural and social welfare institutions.19 The garden city would thus function as a true city, a center for culture and society as well as homes and industry, rather than as a bedroom suburb. Although Howard took pride in his role as "inventor" of the garden city, in To-morrow he conceded that in important ways his idea grew out of earlier Utopian and reformist literature. He specifically mentioned three principal sources: colonization schemes, suggested by Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the economist Alfred Marshall, in which population and industry would be relocated from city to countryside; a system of communal ownership of land that he found in Herbert Spencer's Social Statics (1851) and in a 1775 pamphlet written by Thomas Spence (which had been republished in 1882) that advocated the nationalization of land; and any number of proposals to establish an ideal city, though he cited James Silk Buckingham's 1849 book National Evils and Practical •^Remedies, which proposed a model town of Victoria, a community of 25,000 residents surrounded by an agricultural greenbelt, as part of the solution to urban

Introduction

7

problems. Howard described these and other influences on his thinking in chapter 10 of To-morrow, which he entitled "A Unique Combination of Proposals."20 Intentionally or not, by describing his invention in these words, Howard diminished his own accomplishment. The garden city as he conceived it was a remarkably creative synthesis, not simply a marriage of country and city or a melding together of ideas he found in books and articles or heard expressed in meeting halls or discussion groups. What made To-morrow stand apart from the hundreds of other Utopias imagined toward the end of the nineteenth century was its combination of the visionary and the practical, the radical tradition and the essentially conservative ideal of the harmonious community. It was this synthesis, an attractive new community that would relieve pressing social problems yet could also be built within the existing social, economic, and governmental structure, that proved to have such a powerful hold on Howard's readers. Tomorrow attracted an enthusiastic and influential following, and within only a few years the Garden City Association and its affiliated corporations acquired the land and commenced construction of Letchworth Garden City. Designed by Unwin and Parker, Letchworth was soon widely recognized as the physical manifestation of Howard's garden city idea.21 The garden city Howard envisioned was a new type of community, neither urban nor rural, that combined the advantages of city and country. It would consist of a tract of 6,000 acres, 5,000 set aside for agriculture and as sites for institutions, the remaining 1,000 to be developed as the town. When construction was complete, Howard anticipated that the garden city would have a population of 32,000—30,000 in the town and the other 2,000 in the agricultural lands. The published sketch of the town was circular, though Howard conceded that the shape was suggestive. A public garden stood at the center, surrounded by a range of public, cultural, and social institutions and a 145-acre open space he called Central Park. Extending around the park was the Crystal Palace—a building undoubtedly named after Joseph Paxton's glass and iron structure erected in Hyde Park for the great international exhibition of 1851—which Howard described as a wide glass arcade that would function as the retail center of the community and as an exhibit area.22 Six broad boulevards extended from the center to the edge of the built area and divided the garden city into six wards or zones. The Grand Avenue, a 420-foot-wide swath of green space, divided the area set aside for residential development and was reserved for substantial houses as well as schools, playgrounds, gardens, and churches. Industry, attracted to the garden city by the economic advantage of inexpensive land combined with efficient

8

David Schuyler

transportation facilities, would be located adjacent to the residential zones and would provide the work for most residents. Although the average lot size (20 X 130 feet) would result in a relatively high density of building and population, there was ample provision of open space within the garden city and outside it. Garden City was appropriately named.23 The encircling agricultural lands would not only produce food for residents of the garden city but also ensure that the community would not sprawl into the surrounding countryside. Howard wanted to limit both the size of the garden city as physical space and the number of residents who could five there. When the garden city reached its limits, it would replicate itself in a new community. The initial garden city would ultimately become one of a number of similar communities, separated from each other by an inviolate greenbelt yet connected by an intermunicipal railroad. These communities would cluster around and be linked by rail to a central city, with the result that residents, "though in one sense living in a town of small size, would be in reality living in, and would enjoy all the advantages of, a great and most beautiful city." The marriage of city and country would be complete.24 One of the great ironies of Howard's life is that what proved most influential in To-morrow was not his analysis of the economic viability of the garden city or his articulation of a strategy for accomplishing important social reform but the garden city as physical fact.25 Howard expected that each garden city would be a stepping-stone, a path toward true reform and a different kind of society. His was a vision of communally owned land, a cooperative society that would free residents from horrific living and working conditions. The garden city would be a commonwealth in which the increasing value of land would subsidize a range of institutions that would promote a-higher quality of life for all residents. Although this essential component of Howard's To-morrow was quickly abandoned by First Garden City, Ltd., the corporation that built Letchworth, other parts of the book have had an enduring influence on the metropolitan landscape. Indeed, Howard's ideas have contributed to the shape of garden cities, new towns (whether built by national governments or private organizations), New Urbanist designs for compact residential and mixed-use neighborhoods, and towncountry marriages in environmental planning—as well as to the discourse over the meaning of community and community design so central to the profession of planning throughout the twentieth century.26 THE ARTICLES PRESENTED IN THIS VOLUME, with two exceptions, were

originally prepared for the conference "From Garden Cities to Green Cities and

Introduction Beyond: Urban Policy for the Twenty-First Century." Organized by Kermit C. Parsons and sponsored by the Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies at Cornell, the conference marked the centennial of the publication of To-morrow. Parsons urged speakers and participants to assess the impact of Howard's ideas on the shape of the twentieth-century city and their relevance for urban and regional planning as well as for environmental planning in the new century. The result was a series of presentations and lively discussions that probed the origins, transformations, and continuing vitality of the garden city idea. Stephen V. Ward's chapter, "Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times," skillfully weaves together Howard's biography, the development of the ideas he articulated in To-morrow, and Howard's place in the English reform tradition. Ward reassesses the prevailing appraisal of Howard as an ineffective leader of the garden city movement who was quickly pushed aside by more prominent and more energetic men. While conceding Howard's modesty, Ward presents him not simply as a gentle idealist but as a man who could act decisively to advance the cause to which he was deeply committed. Building upon Ward's appreciative biographical sketch, three chapters trace the influence of Howard's ideas on the development of the modern metropolis. Pierre Clavel compares the careers of Howard and Patrick Geddes, the Scottish biologist, planner, and regionalist who developed a theory of urban planning rooted in the regional survey. Clavel portrays Howard as too willing to compromise even bedrock principles in order to get the first garden city built. What followed, however, was not the creation of a constellation of other garden cities, as Howard hoped, but the selective implementation of his ideas, usually stripped of his reformist goals, which, Clavel believes, had a regrettable impact on the shape of city and suburb. He suggests that if Howard's ideas had been cast in a more rigorous theory of urban development rather than schematized in diagrams, they might have been better able to withstand the bowdlerization that occurred at the hands of planners and developers. Robert Fishman's chapter, "The Bounded City," presents Howard's idea of limiting the size of a community as more than a defense against the conditions of life and work in overgrown cities such as London. It was also:—and perhaps of greater relevance today than a century ago—a strategy for intensifying the social and cultural life that takes place within a community. At a time when most cities are losing population and jobs, and when a critical challenge to planners is to create urbanity within the sprawling subdivisions of the modern metropolis, Fishman finds yet another layer of significance in Garden Cities of To-morrow: he argues that Howard envisioned the garden city as "a place where a genuinely ur-

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David Schuyler

ban complexity of activities could be carried out within a human-scaled container"—precisely the hope Fishman attributes to the New Urbanism. Robert Freestone's valuable contribution analyzes the various types of greenbelts that have been used in planning since the 1837 platting of Adelaide, which was surrounded by parklands. Howard cited and illustrated the Adelaide plan in To-morrow as an example of how the garden city would replicate itself. Freestone presents the diverse uses greenbelts have served over time, including the preservation of agriculture and rural life, natural and heritage conservation, recreation, pollution minimization, and growth management. He demonstrates that the idea of the greenbelt has proved to be remarkably resilient and adaptable and that, in its various guises, a buffer of green space has been effective in helping to control how cities decentralize.

Introduction

11

number of British New Towns in the post-World War II years. When the Radburn idea returned to the United States in the 1960s, however, it was debased as a result of two major factors: the inability or unwillingness of the public and private sectors to assume the cost of building the major components of the Radburn plan and the development industry's fealty to what it perceives as consumers' lifestyle choices. William Fulton's contribution to this volume takes the New Urbanism to task for its lack of attention to its very antecedents. Tracing the two major traditions in residential planning in the United States, which he terms the formal and informal philosophies of urban design, Fulton argues that the New Urbanism fails to appreciate the informal tradition. Even John Nolen, who has been adopted by Andres Duany and other New Urbanists for his formal town centers, incorporated informal street arrangements in his plans for garden suburbs such as Mariemont, Ohio, and Venice, Florida, especially in residential areas. Fulton believes that the New Urbanism must strike a better balance between the formal and informal traditions if it is to reestablish a truly successful pattern for community design in the United States.

From this discussion of the garden city and its impact on metropolitan and regional planning, the emphasis turns to Howard's ideas on the arrangement of housing and community life and how they have influenced subsequent development. Mervyn Miller's chapter, "The Origins of the Garden City Residential Neighborhood," astutely analyzes the evolution of the neighborhood unit in English town planning prior to the more famous use of the term by the American sociologist Clarence Perry, who contributed a volume to the massive Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs. The village and community designs prepared by Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin—beginning in the 1890s and continuing through the plans for Letchworth Garden City and Hampstead Garden Suburb and other projects into the 1920s—contain the key elements of the neighborhood unit or Stein and Wright's Radburn plan: a community of limited size, with a school as an organizing principle, culs-de-sac, the reservation of green space, a hierarchy of streets, and carefully defined boundaries. What most historians have credited as Perry's invention had clear antecedents: in Unwin's designs, Miller concludes, "neighborhood units had arrived in all but name."

Taking as her premise Howard's expectation that the description of the town he provided in To-morrow would be altered during implementation, Eugenie L. Birch systematically traces the use of the garden city idea through five generations of community planners. After surveying the various manifestations of Howard's legacy over the twentieth century, Birch analyzes four communities developed under the rubric of the New Urbanism—Celebration, Florida; Melrose Commons, Bronx, New York; Mashpee Commons, Cape Cod, Massachusetts; and Lakeside Village-Horizon West, near Orlando, Florida—as contemporary expressions of the garden city idea. Birch concludes by predicting that Howard's ideas, at least in their essential features, will continue to influence housing and community design in the next century.

One chapter added to those first presented at the Garden Cities conference is Kermit C. Parsons' essay on Clarence S. Stein's "Manhattan Transfer." This essay continues the transatlantic dialogue inspired by Howard's ideas. Conceding that Stein and Wright's Radburn plan was based in part on the English community designs by Unwin that the American architects visited in the mid-1920s, Parsons traces the articulation of Stein's contributions to a reshaping of the garden city idea in the United States. He also demonstrates how, following the ini,tial publication of Stein's Toward New Towns for America as articles in Town Planning Review in 1949 and 1950, those ideas influenced the development of a

Together, the chapters by Miller, Parsons, Fulton, and Birch constitute a remarkably cohesive and sustained analysis of Howard's influence on community design in the twentieth century. Two closing essays assess critical aspects of Howard's legacy for the twentyfirst century. Robert E Young's "Green Cities and the Urban Future" concedes that a century after the publication of To-morrow, the human relationship with the environment has worsened, despite the gains that have resulted from the environmental movement. He locates in To-morrow antecedents for several aspects of contemporary ecological thinking, including a faith in technology and effi-

12

David Schuyler

Introduction

ciency to better the human condition, the belief that environmental reform can be achieved within the current political and economic systems, and reliance on a democratic consensus that supports a reformist agenda. But whereas Howard perceived the great city as the cause of so much human misery, at the dawn of a new millennium Young presents the green city now taking shape as the path to an ecologically sustainable future.

13

deed, his attention to the landscape surrounding the home, the physical setting for community, points toward an environmental ethic essential to the modern world, a concern not just for wilderness preservation but for creating sustainable human habitats.27 These themes—the greenbelt, limits on growth, and the house in a comprehensively designed community with abundant open space— all memorably articulated in To-morrow, are probably the most enduring of Ebenezer Howard's ideas and the ones that will continue to influence the shape of the metropolis in the twenty-first century.

Stephen Ward's concluding essay, written after the Cornell conference, expresses regret that Howard sacrificed many of his social reform ideals, which he expected would be achieved through the communal ownership of land, but recognizes the persisting influence of his conceptualization of the garden city. While physical planning antedated the publication of To-morrow, Howard nevertheless had a profound impact on the emerging profession. Indeed, Ward notes, Howard not only emphasized a holistic approach to community design but also "endowed urban planning with a social and community dimension." Although the garden city suffered at the hands of Jane Jacobs and other critics during the 1960s and 1970s, Ward finds that the truly creative innovations in planning undertaken in recent years, which emphasize cooperation, community, and ecology, are really quite compatible with the ideas Howard expressed in To-morrow. Howard's legacy, he concludes, remains a very powerful force in planning, though one that has been largely restricted to the Western world and to a few wealthy communities in Asia and Latin America.

The publication of this book coincides with the centennial of the 1902 edition of Howard's book, Garden Cities of To-morrow. To-morrow and the garden cities and suburbs constructed in the early decades of the twentieth century shaped the two major traditions in city and regional planning: planning as an instrument of social reform and planning as the physical shaping of space and the promotion of its efficient use. In his essay in the Osborn edition of To-morrow, Lewis Mumford asserted that "Howard's ideas have laid the foundation for a new cycle in urban civilization: one in which the means of life will be subservient to the purposes of living."28 At the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is clear that we have not yet arrived at the new era in urban civilization that Mumford anticipated as the fulfillment of Howard's ideas. But that limitation does not lessen our appreciation for all that Howard accomplished. Although most of the essays in this collection focus on the shaping of communities as physical spaces and arenas for social interaction, the authors honor the commitment to social reform so central to Howard's life and to his legacy.

Collectively, these essays demonstrate that Howard's ideas have had a remarkable and continuing effect on three aspects of twentieth-century planning. First, Howard's agricultural greenbelt has become a key component of growth management and environmental planning. In the various manifestations it has taken, as Robert Freestone has documented, it has proved to be effective in determining the direction and pattern of urban growth; moreover, its "green" features have been subsumed within the sustainability and compact urbanism theories that will shape the next generation of metropolitan development. Second, Howard's idea of the bounded city really established the compelling argument for limits, for growth controls designed to prevent communities from sprawling over the countryside and losing their distinctiveness, their humane scale. Third, Howard advanced an idea of community defined by its physical spaces—its housing arrangements, common facilities, open land, and recreational areas— that has influenced a host of planners over the course of the twentieth century. Howard's vision of decent, healthy communities designed to foster genuine social interaction is no less important to the human condition a century later. In-

m

CHAPTER

Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times

ONE

E b e n e z e r

H o w a r d

H i s Life a n d T i m e s

S t e p h e n V. W a r d

Were we able to transport ourselves back in time and space to the last days of April 1928 and to Guessens Road in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire, England, we would witness a curious and striking scene.1 Outside house number 5, the surface of the quiet road in this still small and recently formed new community was thickly strewn with straw. Yet, leaving aside the oddity of our own sudden presence, the scene itself was anachronistic and displaced. It belonged to Victorian London, where gravely ill persons, usually those of some public importance, were by this simple means spared the noisy clatter of horses' hooves and iron-bound wheels on the paved streets of this great and busy capital city. Such a practice also gave the transition from life to death a public dimension, becoming a prelude to the final public ceremony of the funeral. Inside number 5 the inventor of the garden city and founder of the two practical experiments at Letchworth and Welwyn, Sir Ebenezer Howard, lay dying. His last days were spent in circumstances not exactly of poverty but certainly of little comfort.2 For some time after he fell ill, he had been forced to rest day and night on the sofa. There was no spare bed in the small house until a visitor, shocked at seeing the great man forced to suffer in this way, provided one. Nor

was there much tenderness to compensate for the absence of material comfort. Ebenezer's relationship with the second Mrs. Howard had never been easy. She was an eccentric woman who later spent time in a mental asylum. One of Howard's daughters reported that she made his home life miserable, and for several years they had lived apart. He had returned a few years before his death because he felt sorry for her (and, we may suspect, because his finances, always strained, were not capable any longer of maintaining two separate households). But her lack of sympathy for the cause to which he had given his life did not soften. Because of his wife's hostility, even Howard's close relatives and associates found it difficult to see him during his final illness. In comparison to the personal poignancy of Howard's last days, the straw in the roadway signaled a very different response in the public realm. It was laid on the orders of the Estates Department of the company responsible for building Welwyn Garden City. We may reasonably wonder whether it served to deaden noise. Howard's home was close to the center of the new garden city, but Guessens Road was a purely residential street, carrying little traffic. It was the symbolic significance of the straw that was important. First, and most obviously, it signified civil respect—here was a man who had made the public good his life's work. Now, as he approached his end, he was seen as deserving a genuinely public display of concern and consideration. In a more subtle and unconscious way, it also recalled the London of Howard's younger days, the noisy, teeming city that had variously excited and repelled him and ultimately had inspired him to develop an alternative way of living. It further served to locate Howard as a figure very much of the nineteenth century, whose conception of the city was of streets lined with buildings and filled with horse-drawn traffic. Tracing exactly how Howard moved from this metropolitan fife to, using his own term, "invent" the garden city is far from easy. Only a small, confusingly arranged, and rather unrewarding Howard archive has survived. This was another result of his second wife's lack of sympathy with his work and anger with his associates in the garden city movement. There are reports that she made a bonfire in the yard of most of his papers and notebooks.3 The archives of the garden city movement itself and those of Howard's disciple, Frederic J. Osborn, give more detail about the last thirty years of his life. But his early years, before the publication of To-morrow in 1898, remain shadowy. Both of his biographers, Dugald MacFadyen in 1933 and Robert Beevers in 1988, have therefore struggled to provide entirely convincing accounts.4 Osborn, who at one time had hoped to write a full biography, faced similar diffi-

15

16

Stephen V. Ward

culties in his various shorter insights on Howard's life and work.5 Finally, we should note the important contributions of two American scholars, Stanley Buder and Robert Fishman.6 What then can we say about the state of knowledge of Howard before 1898? The basic facts of his life are easily recounted. Born in 1850 of lower-middleclass parents in the city of London, he left school to become a city clerk, like many thousands of other young men of his social background. Other than an unusual facility for shorthand writing, developed in his late teenage years, there was nothing remarkable about him. Not unusually, however, he showed a certain restlessness, changing jobs several times in about three years. In 1871 he threw up this rather conventional pattern of lower-middle-class life to emigrate with two friends to the United States. He seems to have had no very precise sense of what he wanted from this change. In part, certainly, the move was encouraged by romantic notions of the rugged frontier life. Thus, by March 1872, Howard and his friends were homesteading on adjoining 160-acre quarter sections in the coincidentally named Howard County, Nebraska, some 120 miles due west of Omaha. But it was not a life that suited Howard. City born, with absolutely no farming experience, he, like many others, proved a failure. The highlight of his brief dalliance with frontier life was, improbably enough, an encounter with Buffalo Bill.7 It may have been the one moment when the romantic frontier world he imagined from teenage readings of the Boys Own Magazine coincided with reality. The harsh rawness of life on Nebraska's treeless terrain and the grueling nature of the physical labor was too much. Within the year he had moved to Chicago and the much more familiar world of shorthand reporting. He remained in Chicago for another four years, seeing it rebuilt following the great fire of 1871 to emerge as the most dynamic and innovative city in the world at that time. For the young Howard, in his midtwenties, these were important formative years. They gave him, according to his own later assessment, "a fuller and wider outlook on religious and social questions than I think I should have then gained in England." Prompted by a Quaker colleague and friend, in Chicago he began to read seriously and move toward, again in his own words, "a perfect freedom of thought," unencumbered by religious preconceptions.8 Yet this did not mean that he abandoned religion in any fundamental way. His freethinking was accompanied by a growing interest in the connections between the spiritual and the material worlds. The transcendentalist writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson strengthened this interest, characterized as they were by a particular interest in the human relationship to nature. This theme, of course, re-

Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times curred in his later formulation of the garden city, though it was not at this stage particularly prominent. Like many Victorians, he was, however, drawn to spiritualism. In his case the interest was sparked by Mrs. Cora Richmond, a wellknown American spiritualist whom he first heard in Chicago in 1876, shortly before his return to England. Exactly why he returned permanently to England is unclear, but once back in London he resumed his stenographic work, increasingly in a parliamentary context. Through this occupation he became a silent witness and faithful recorder of important episodes in public affairs in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was a time of increasing tensions between capital and labor, with many shades of reformist opinion calling for improvements in social conditions. At the same time he continued the broader intellectual quests begun during his stay in Chicago. The year 1879 was an important one in his life. It saw his first, and very happy, marriage. He also joined a freethinking debating group, the Zetetical Society, which included many future members of the Fabian Society, a hugely important group of socialist intellectuals founded in 1884. Howard, at this stage a supporter of the Liberal Party, never joined the Fabians. During the early 1880s, however, the Zetetical Society brought him into contact with key figures such as the budding socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw and the future Labour Party intellectual Sydney Webb. Howard was not a major contributor to the society's proceedings, but in 1880 he presented two papers on spiritualism, an indication of his continuing interest. He also encountered Cora Richmond again and was even more impressed, particularly when she told him he had "a message to give to the world."9 Such words alone, of course, rarely change the direction of a person's life unless they give expression to a thought already half-formed. During the 1880s, Howard seems to have become genuinely ambitious for some real achievement. For many years, much of his inventive energy was focused on mechanical gadgets concerned with the world of shorthand and typing. He never entirely abandoned these interests and, in fact, died with debts incurred trying to perfect a stenographic machine. We know from his letters to Lizzie, his long-suffering first wife, that in the mid-1880s he tried very hard to make a success of one invention, a proportional-spacing device, making two unsuccessful visits to major typewriter manufacturers in America. It is tempting to see his more complete concentration on social reform matters from the late 1880s as a deflection of his inventive energies in the wake of these failures. The roots of his social ideas clearly go back before this time, though. Shortly

17

18

Stephen V. Ward

before he left America in 1876, he had come across an English pamphlet written by Dr. Benjamin Ward Richardson entitled Hygeia, or the City of Health.10 This work articulated the idea of a low density city, with wide streets, an underground railway, and ample parkland. Back in England, he took ever growing interest in the increasing flow of reformist literature, much of which was the subject of debate at the Zetetical Society. The land-taxing ideas of Henry George became widely known in Britain during the 1880s, shortly after the publication of his famous work, Progress and Poverty.11 Meanwhile, an alternative British approach to the land question was promoted by Alfred Russel Wallace, who founded the Land Nationalisation Society (LNS) in 1881.12 The principal inspiration for the common ownership of land that the LNS sought had come from Herbert Spencer's 1851 book Social Statics.13 This was a seminal work of English socialism, more important than Karl Marx's Capital, and was held in high regard within the Zetetical Society. Yet the LNS program went back much further even than Spencer. It revived the arguments of a radical 1775 pamphlet by Thomas Spence that had been given a new timeliness by being republished by the socialist H. M. Hyndman in 1882.14 Aplethora of other ideas came to Howard's attention during the 1880s. Some were older works, such as Edward Gibbon Wakefield's Art of Colonisation, published originally in 1849.15 He also discovered an earlier vision of the ideal city, in James Silk Buckingham's National Evils and Practical Remedies, also published in 1849.16 Other works, like Alfred Marshall's 1884 arguments for a planned decentralization of manufacturing from the big cities to factory villages in rural areas, were part of the evolving contemporary debate about urban problems and their solution. Howard himself read and collected quotations from many of these works. By the late 1880s there were clear signs that his engagement with this radical reformism was assuming a progressively more active form. In 1888, for example, he himself arranged an English printing of the visionary book Looking Backward by American Edward Bellamy.17 It was a work that had a great catalytic influence on his own thinking, even though he, along with other English radical thinkers, including William Morris, was uneasy about some of its political dimensions. To judge by the surviving archival material, Howard had begun by about 1890 to synthesize these many influences into a visionary proposal of his own. He was entering his forties, a married man with four children, living in a modest suburban home in North London. In 1891 he drafted a paper called "The City of Health and How to Build It," a reference to Richardson's Hygeia but showing

Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times

19

how communal land ownership might make its realization possible.18 At this stage he did not use the term garden city. The archival organization of his surviving writings is confused, making chronological ordering difficult. It appears, though, that the first name he favored for his model settlement was "Unionville." However, by the spring of 1892, when he drafted a book-length manuscript that was in many important respects similar to that eventually published in October 1898, the preferred name had become "Rurisville."19 The first few chapters were typed and privately circulated. Howard also began to lecture widely on this topic. The initial interest, such as it was, came from the Land Nationalisation Society and, even more at this stage, the Nationalisation of Labour Society (NLS), a body formed in 1890 to promote the ideas of Edward Bellamy in Britain. Thanks to Stanley Buder,20 we know that the NLS provided Howard in early 1893 with his first important public platform to speak about his proposals. We also know that at about the same time, he became involved in a communitarian project promoted mainly by the NLS. The form of the intended project was, however, inspired more by Bellamy's than Howard's ideas, depending on a more collectivist society than Howard ever sought. Nothing came of the project, and there was no specific reference to it in Howard's later accounts. Nevertheless, through it he learned of an ambitious but failed model collectivist colony at Topolobampo in Mexico, which did warrant a brief mention in To-morrow as it was finally published. Although the paucity of documentary evidence renders this whole episode shadowy, we may assume that Howard was rather chastened by the whole experience. He seems thereafter to have distanced himself from the Nationalisation of Labour Society. He continued to push his ideas intermittently, so far as his financial circumstances would permit, over the following years. But the needs of his growing family certainly did not allow him to reduce his professional work commitments. He also made various modifications to the draft book, especially the later chapters. By 1896 Howard seems to have finalized the ideas that finally appeared. In that year, for example, he submitted a prospective article to the Contemporary Review, a leading journal for political discussion.21 Effectively a summary of his ideas, it corresponded very closely with the book that appeared two years later. The article was rejected but is especially notable because it marks his first use of Garden City in preference to "Rurisville" or "Unionville." Where the new term came from is unclear. Chicago before the 1871 fire had been widely known as the city in a garden (Urbs in Horto was the city's motto). Howard always denied

20

Stephen V. Ward

that this was the source, though without convincing several authoritative commentators. Others have claimed that William Morris used the term in the 1870s.22 (It does not, however, appear in News from Nowhere, Morris's own Arcadian and romantic vision of a London transformed, published in 1890.) By 1896, therefore, Howard very probably had completed his book. Not surprisingly, no publisher was prepared to treat it as a commercial proposition, without some financial contribution from Howard himself. His own finances remained weak; he struggled even to maintain his family. Finally an American friend, George Dickman, the managing director of Kodak in Britain and a fellow admirer of Cora Richmond, gave Howard's wife £50 to bring the book to publication.23 In October 1898 it was at last published under the title To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform.2* The publisher was Swan Sonnenschein, a small London publishing house whose list also included Capital by Karl Marx. Howard did not copyright the book and was paid no royalties. Where, then, did the Howard of 1898 stand amid the wider currents of latenineteenth-century English social reformism? The answer is a paradoxical one. He has to be seen, I think, as part of the broad evolution of nineteenth-century socialist ideas. Yet important qualifications of this are necessary because his ideas certainly did not belong to the socialist mainstream. We have noted already that he did not make the same personal transition in the 1880s that many fellow members did, from the Zetetical to the Fabian Society. Nor, though he was evidently acquainted with some of the leading figures, did he play any apparent role in the other important bodies that formed the emerging socialist mainstream—the Social Democratic Federation (founded 1883), the Socialist League (founded 1884), or the Independent Labour Party (founded 1893). (His disciple, Frederic Osborn, finally persuaded him to relinquish his membership in the Liberal Party and join the Independent Labour Party in 1917.)25 Howard was also profoundly suspicious of what by the end of the nineteenth century was becoming the dominant tactic of English socialism, namely capturing the state through electoral means to achieve radical reform. This involved direct political struggle with the problems of the world and marked an important shift in emphasis from Utopian attempts to create a new parallel society. Yet Howard, though he understood many of the pitfalls of communitarian socialism, continued to see great advantages in what he called the "experimental" method, trying to make a fresh start in a new community. I

'I

His concept of the "Master Key," the title of the first chapter of To-morrow and the subject of an unpublished diagram prepared in 1892 (fig. 1), shows this mistrust of parliamentary reformism very clearly. He was not alone in this, of

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course, but this does not mean that he had a very central position in advocating nonstate forms of socialism. He had no real connections with trade unionism and was critical of what he saw as trade unions' waste of energy. In To-morrow, for example, he wrote: "If labour leaders spent half the energy in co-operative

21

22

Stephen V. Ward

Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times of groups of individuals coming together freely to create socialism by practical actions in the way they lived their lives. The word "Co-operation" appears as one of the attributes of the "town-country" magnet in his famous Three Magnets diagram, twinned with "Freedom." The early draft versions from 1892 show instead the more cumbersome but also more revealing terms "IndividualisticSocialism" and "Freedom not Regimentation" (figs. 3-5).

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organisation that they now waste in co-operative disorganisation the end of our unjust system would be at hand." 26 These words also serve to place him more positively in the arena of socialist thought with which he himself felt most comfortable—the cooperative movement (fig. 2). He was deeply attracted to the idea

Even in this central belief in individualistic socialism based on cooperation, his links to the mainstream of the British cooperative movement, focused on retailing, were not close. Howard wanted the cooperative principle to be extended into other spheres. In 1898 he still had no very clear idea about how this was to be done, however. Thus he does not seem at that time to have been aware of the copartnership movement, a variant of cooperation that soon became closely associated with the garden city.27 This had existed since the 1880s, partly growing out of a rift in the cooperative movement between the principles of consumer and worker cooperation. Already the copartnership movement had taken various small initiatives in manufacturing and housing. In 1898, though, Howard's approach to the principle of cooperation was still evolving. After initial enthusiasm, he had decisively rejected Edward Bellamy's overarching approach, which pressed all aspects of life into a cooperative mold, implying thereby a degree of coercion. He was influenced more by the anarchist arguments of Prince Peter Kropotkin. These remarkable essays became known during the early 1890s and were published in collective form in 1899 as Fields, Factories and Workshops.2* Kropotkin stressed a much freer approach to creating new communities. As Howard wrote in 1896, "we must take men pretty much as we find them; and if any attempt is made to impose all sorts of restrictions upon those who are asked to come—they simply will not come."29 The one absolute insistence on cooperation that Howard made was the collective ownership of land and communal enjoyment of the benefits of land value increases (fig. 6). Individualistic ownership of landed property and private appropriation of land value increases were prohibited. It was this that gave Howard his most tangible links to existing reformism, through the agency of the Land Nationalisation Society. But the collective ownership of land was, in Howard's view, as far as things needed to go. Other forms of capital might be privately, cooperatively, or municipally owned. That was entirely up to the people who lived in his new garden city. In earlier drafts of the book, he worried a great deal about whether the capitalist employer might end up being the principal beneficiary of low rents, by being able to reduce his workers' wages. He hoped this would not happen but did

24

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Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times

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not manage to demonstrate the assertion convincingly. In the end he revealed none of these worries in the version finally published. In this he seems to have felt that the garden city, his Master Key, would unlock a spirit of altruism. This was one of several points in his argument that represented a partial leap of faith rather than an entirely rational step. It also highlights an important general point: above and beyond all connections with specific

26

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specific formulation of the garden city. In the first chapter of his book, he refers to "the problem how to restore people to the land—that beautiful land of ours with its canopy of sky, the air that blows upon it, the sun that warms it, the rain and dew that moisten it—the very embodiment of Divine love for man." A little later he writes that his garden city will pour a flood of light on many social problems, "even the relations of man to the Supreme Power."30 The communal ownership of land, despite its undoubted rationalist and anticlerical dimension, also appealed to the fundamental Christian notion, especially strongly held

27

28

Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times

Stephen V. Ward

within the nonconformist and free churches, that the earth was God's gift to humanity. Again, we can detect these sentiments in Howard's writings and diagrams, especially the unpublished versions. When we consider Howard's overall mix of influences, different in so many respects from the main directions of social and political thought in the late nineteenth century, it is easy to understand the patronizing, though generally sym^ pathetic, tone of early reactions to To-morrow. Mainstream socialists such as the Fabians felt that he had simply missed the point. Most other commentators saw the book simply as an exercise in utopianism, fine on paper but unlikely ever to achieve reality. And they had a point. There was absolutely no reason to suppose anything tangible would follow. The really remarkable thing about To-morrow was how much of it formed a basis for real achievements. The first step on the "peaceful path to real reform" promised by the subtitle of To-morrow was the creation of the Garden City Association in 1899.31 Then followed two decades of solid achievement: To-morrow was republished with minor amendments in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow (fig. 7); the first garden city was established at Letchworth in 1903; and a wider campaign for garden suburbs and town planning was launched, also from about 1903. By 1914 garden city ideas had already spread throughout the world. German, French, Russian, and Czech versions of Garden Cities of To-morrow soon appeared. Garden city associations were formed in Germany, France, Belgium, the United States, Russia, Italy, Spain, Holland, Austria, and elsewhere. An International Garden Cities and Town Planning Association appeared in 1913. By this time there had been a noticeable drift away from the garden city in favor of garden suburbs and town planning. But this was partially redeemed with a new campaign for garden cities toward the end of World War I. A second garden city, at Welwyn, was started in 1919. These years also brought Howard acute personal pain. Lizzie, his first wife, died in 1904, and he entered upon his disastrous second marriage three years later. But his public life at least should have resulted in considerable satisfaction. He became an international figure, known and respected throughout the world. Yet it is debatable how significant was his role in the movement after 1898. The dominant view is that he was not a practical man and that it fell to others to realize his ideas. Looking at the usual pictures of him as a white-haired old man, it is easy to see him as a benevolent grandfather figure, deserving respect but a bit muddled in handling the real world. Even Osborn, his great admirer, admitted that many saw him as an "ineffectual angel."32 But this judgment does not seem to be entirely fair.

29

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Figure 7. The cover of Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902). The work of the socialist artist Walter Crane, it helped to position the book within the emergent movement for town planning. Author's collection.

The garden city movement after 1898 began very much from Howard's main base of support, the Land Nationalisation Society. The meeting that formed the Garden City Association was dominated by the LNS, which provided half of the twelve founder members, including most of the new association's officers.33 The other founders included individuals who broadly shared Howard's religious

30

Stephen V. Ward

Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times

beliefs and interests in a cooperative approach to social reform. The social networks of this initial grouping gave a general shape to the early development of the movement. Increasingly, however, figures of greater significance in other walks of life, without a primary allegiance to land nationalization, came to play more prominent roles. The association moved into the mainstream of Edwardian liberal reformism as prominent professionals, industrialists, politicians of all parties, landowners, and others became involved. This was apparent both in the association and in the directors of First Garden City, Ltd., established to build Letchworth (fig. 8). Put simply, we can say that the social basis of support began to shift from broadly lower-middle-class origins to embrace more powerful interests drawn from the upper middle and upper classes. One particularly loyal supporter was the Quaker chocolate maker George Cadbury, already head of a powerful industrial dynasty and creator of the model industrial village at Bournville. Another was Alfred Harmsworth, proprietor of the Daily Mail newspaper. The Daily Mail circulated very widely among the suburban lower middle classes and did much to raise the profile of the movement. Prominent members of the Liberal aristocracy such as Earl Grey also lent their patronage. Comparing Howard with such figures, more accustomed to the easy exercise of power, it is easy to see why his influence declined. There were also important gaps. Howard's own rather ambiguous relationship with the socialist movement inhibited the building of links with the emergent political force of Labour until after 1918. Before 1914 there was suspicion of what was perceived as bourgeois philanthropy and reform. Howard's own concerns for urban poverty and bad housing were partly masked by the emphasis on predominantly middle-class garden suburbs. Moreover, Howard's original radical links with the LNS also seem to have weakened. Prominent individuals remained common to both movements. Yet in 1913 the LNS secretary and the man who had actually presented the motion to create the Garden City Association in 1899, Joseph Hyder, made not a single reference to the garden city movement in his massive volume The Case for Land Nationalisation?* Of course, the evolution of the garden city movement was not merely about social networks. New reformist connections were forged, which elaborated on the conceptual and practical bases of the garden city idea. Two of these links, dating from about 1901, helped the movement become a powerful voice in the evolving Edwardian debates about urban problems and their solution. These were the copartnership movement and the Arts and Crafts movement.

-i)
Figure 8. The Board of Directors of Letchworth. Howard's original radicalism was increasingly drawn into mainstream liberal reformism as many leading businessmen and professionals brought their expertise and influence into the garden city movement. First Garden City Heritage Museum, Letchworth Garden City.

3r

32

Stephen V. Ward

We have already seen that copartnership was not part of To-morrow}s However, it quickly became the main mechanism of early housing provision at Letchworth and in many Edwardian garden suburbs. Some early industry at Letchworth was also run on copartnership lines. The coalescence of garden city and copartnership brought important new individuals into the garden city movement. Chief among these was Ralph Neville, an extremely able lawyer, who was spotted by Howard in t9oi and almost immediately became chairman of the Garden City Association. The garden city movement was also attracting a growing number of architects working within the Arts and Crafts movement, which was inspired by John Ruskin and William Morris. Morris died in 1896, and Ruskin was almost at the end of his life when To-morrow appeared, so we do not know their views of Howard's garden city. It soon became clear, however, that the romantic socialism and preindustrial vernacular aesthetic of the Arts and Crafts movement meshed quite neatly with Howard's concept of the garden city. Several Arts and Crafts architects joined the Garden City Association, and Howard actively encouraged the connection. The most important recruits, Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, were not initially the best known. Yet it fell to these two to replace Howard's rather crude physical representation of the garden city with an aesthetic and physical form of tremendous potency.36

Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times

33

pects. Quickly the garden suburb became the dominant form, relegating Letchworth to the sidelines. The process was further encouraged by the international diffusion of Howard's idea. Despite his own efforts to spread the word (partly in the new international language of Esperanto), much was lost or misunderstood as other countries encountered the garden city. So far, then, Howard hardly appears as a dominant player in the movement's early years. At Letchworth he had few clear ideas about how to develop the garden city on a sound business basis, so that investment could occur, and he was quickly nudged aside. It was the same with the lobbying activities of the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association (its new name in 1909).37 Others proved more effective persuaders, able to talk the language of business and convince other practical men and develop practical, reasonable programs to sway the suburban readers of the Daily Mail.

At New Earswick (from 1902), Letchworth (from 1903), and Hampstead Garden Suburb (from 1905), Parker and Unwin gave full expression to this new environmental dimension of the garden city. Typical residential densities, interestingly, were roughly a third lower than Howard had suggested in To-morrow. He never resisted this change and was well pleased with the outcome. He had more misgivings about a broader shift of which Parker and Unwin were an integral part. Howard's essential concern had been to change society. In part, this involved changing the physical arrangements for urban living. But it was certainly not the whole project. Now, as garden city thinking became an integral part of the new discourse on what, from 1905, was called town planning, this one aspect became dominant. It was encouraged, too, by the subtly different presentation of Howard's book in its second edition.

Yet this is not the whole story. Occasionally we do glimpse a man truly capable of shaping events by his actions, not just by the passive persuasion of his ideas. The best illustration comes in 1919 with the genesis of Welwyn Garden City. Here we see Howard's frustration at what the practical men had done with his ideas and a willingness to seize the moment for decisive action. After the prewar interest in the garden suburb came a revival for the garden city proper during the last years of World War I. Howard joined the moves to press for a government program. A short book, New Towns after the War (fig. 9), appeared in 1918, authored by a group including Howard called the "New Townsmen."38 At the time he was almost seventy. His younger associates, particularly Charles Purdom and Fred Osborn, felt they were updating his ideas for the postwar world.39 Yet Howard had never lost the mistrust of government revealed in his Master Key diagram. He soon began talking about a second garden city on the private Letchworth model. Moreover, he ignored the majority view, that the movement should concentrate on lobbying for government new towns. Instead he took unilateral action. Without telling most of his closest associates and without assurance that sufficient money would be forthcoming, he took an extraordinary risk. He bid at auction for an estate that became the major part of Welwyn Garden City (fig. 10).

Although he may well not have recognized what was happening until later, there is no doubt that Howard regretted this shift in emphasis from social reform to physical planning. A particular loss was that the totality of the garden city became fragmented. The new practice of town planning emphasized selective application of some aspects of the garden city idea and ignored other as-

When the rest of the movement discovered what had happened, they were horrified. Howard himself clearly understood the enormous risks he was running, of personal bankruptcy and serious damage to the whole movement. Witnesses immediately after the auction spoke of him trembling uncontrollably. But the others also realized that the stakes were very high. If they let him fail, the

T 34

Stephen V. Ward

Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times ONE. SHILLING NET_

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Figure g. The cover of New Towns after the War (ror8). Howard was nominally one of the coauthors (styled "the New Townsmen") of this book. It proposed using state power on a wide scale to create many garden cities (now, for thefirsttime, called New Towns). Howard never accepted that this would be possible. Sir Frederic Osborn Archive, Welwyn Garden City Library. III" III II I fl| «'i
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whole movement could go under. Against their better judgment, they were effectively forced to support him and make Welwyn a success. Not without justification, Osborn considered the genesis of Welwyn Garden City to be Howard's most remarkable personal achievement. From our point of view, Howard's actions in 1919 lay bare qualities that challenge our simple stereotype of the genial and unworldly inventor (fig. 11). Here was a man capable, even in old age, of acting with reckless courage and ignoring the wishes of his closest associates. Beneath his deceptively unassuming exterior was a person convinced he was right. He was prepared to accept enormous risks to get the outcome he wanted. Not least, his actions remind us of an extraordinary ability to convince people that he was worth supporting, even when pursuing actions that seemed foolhardy. Howard did not do this kind of thing very often. It was a tactic that, by its nature, could only be used occasionally. But his life shows other signs of single-

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minded, even reckless, pursuit of an obsessive interest. Those closest to him undoubtedly paid the price of his inventive activities, both mechanical and social. In a letter discussing their debts, written shortly before her death, his first wife revealed how his reformist mission had denied his family a life of reasonable

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Stephen V. Ward

Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times changing the world was itself a kind of selfishness, albeit with altruistic outcomes. The costs of the rich conceptual legacy that Howard bequeathed to urban planning were mainly borne by his family and occasionally by his associates. Now, however, removed in time and space from Howard's world, we can see (if perhaps a little too readily) how small that price was compared to what flowed from his obsession. We should derive comfort from the notion that such gentle idealism abides still at the conceptual heart of planning, an activity that is too often riddled with the ordinary selfishness of humanity.

Figure 11. Portrait of Howard about the time he established Welwyn Garden City. Town and Country Planning Association.

comfort and security. Even in her exasperation, she felt the need to apologize for not quite living up to his standards: "I may be selfish in this matter, but if I am I fear there are lots of selfish people."40 Her husband was a man who stood apart from the ordinary selfishness of humanity. In the main, his image as the unworldly, even saindy, inventor of the garden city (and, to a large extent, of planning) was justified. Yet genius, even gentle genius, has its price. Howard's single-minded pursuit of his own project for

37

CHAPTER

TWO

E b e n e z e r P a t r i c k

H o w a r d

Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes39

a n d

G e d d e s

Two Approaches to City Development

Pierre Clavel

The irony of Ebenezer Howard and the garden city idea is that it started so well and ended up compromised, at most a minor set of exceptions in the course of metropolitan expansion. The compromises began with the first garden city of Letchworth in 1904, by Howard himself as he proved unable to counter the demands of a financier-dominated board of directors or to give adequate direction to the architects. Why this happened is one of the fascinating footnotes in the history of city planning. Robert Beevers, Howard's most recent biographer, notes the failure of Howard's career to come into closer contact with that of another important contemporary figure in planning, the Scottish promoter of "civics," Patrick Geddes (fig. 12). He writes: It is interesting to speculate whether he would have taken a more positive view of his own function had he met earlier. .. Patrick Geddes Howard . . . was closer to Geddes in oudook than he was to most of the men who had gathered around him, but his genius was not of a kind to formulate a theory of town planning. By so modesdy conceding the task of planning his garden city to the "experts," he rendered them subject to the whims of a board of directors who understood far less than he did about the true nature of the task they were employed to carry out.'

Figure 12. Patrick Geddes in 1898. Philip Mairet, Pioneer of Sociology: The Life and Letters of Patrick Geddes (London: Lund Humphries, 1957); reproduced by permission of the publisher.

Was this a missed opportunity for the development of theory to reinforce an innovative practice? The two men share a great deal, and so it is a tantalizing question. Or were they incompatible, not just in personality but in underlying theoretical scheme? If the latter, perhaps the wisest course will be to think of the two as an enduring polarity, one we must simply find a way to live with. Howard (1850-192 8) had laid out an elaborate scheme with many components, which, taken together, would have been quite stunning as reform, an ac-

40

tion so comprehensive and ramified that it had the potential to change the society.2 But in the end those with money to invest or the power to build the proposed cities fastened only on the physical components of the scheme, and the idea dissipated. Arguably, Howard and his followers failed to construct a sufficiendy cohesive theory to guide themselves when presented with compromises. Without a theory, the larger implications of Howard's scheme were lost, although pieces were appropriated for various purposes.3 Geddes (1854-1932), who was promoting city development schemes at about the same time, represents another pole of the theory-action problem: a theory that could not be assimilated.4 He and Howard knew and supported each other, beginning in 1904, but no deep collaboration emerged. Reasons for this can be found in a comparison of their underlying theoretical schemes.

T h e G a r d e n C i t y as T h e o r y a n d P r o g r a m Howard is described as a modest, practical man who, while supporting himself as a shorthand stenographer, drank in the ideas of English radicals in the 1880s and then, in 1898, published a synthetic scheme. In part because of its graphic form, his design catalyzed the efforts of planners and even became government policy over the next half century. At least the following influences have been recounted:

•

I

Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes

Pierre Clavel

1. There was a general reaction against the form the industrial city had taken in the nineteenth century: its filth and disease, its crowding, and its concentration of poverty and inequality. For many, including Howard, these were also understood to be the symptoms of a deeper problem in the economic system itself, which was nevertheless a powerful force that promised to yield to no obvious remedy. 2. Against this was the idea of progress, buttressed by the emergence of science and the recent inroads of ideas like Darwin's theory of evolution. Darwinism, while subject to interpretations that supported competition and struggle with metaphors of nature "red in tooth and claw," also opened the possibility of an emerging tendency toward cooperation, including the consumer and producer "cooperatives" that multiplied during the century.5 Howard's assumption was that emerging cooperative tendencies among elites would make them respond to a well-laid-out scheme.6

3.

"Radicalism" did not mean Marxism. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had responded to the emergence of capitalism—which included the industrial city—by positing that capitalists, as a class, were rationally impelled to oppress their workers until they were weakened by their own internal contradictions and vulnerable to an organized working class. The radicals, influenced by a belief that progress included a tendency toward a softening of class oppression, had no taste for class struggle and sought other solutions.7

4.

Alfred Marshall argued for "colonization" schemes whereby, in virgin territory, land could be organized in ways that avoided the problems of the industrial city; this idea, he and others argued, could then be applied not just to the open spaces of the New World (this had attracted Robert Owen to Indiana) but also to the relatively open land around English cities.8

5.

Henry George had pointed out that increases in city land values, which confounded efforts to create better conditions through land purchase, were socially created by migration and could, through legislation, be recaptured by the public. George, during a visit to London in 1884, successfully promoted these ideas among the English radicals.9 Cooperative ownership of land could be extended to cooperative management of a city, an idea that Howard adopted. Schemes for city design on open land already existed. Beevers notes Howard's interest in Benjamin Ward Richardson's 1876 pamphlet Hygeia, or the City of Health, as one influence.10

6.

Howard's great contribution, according to his biographers and other commentators, was to put these separate ideas together into a concrete proposal for building a city. Howard's scheme had a real meaning much more profound than the physical oudine for city reform that most of his followers seemed to adopt. He was concerned, like his radical friends and associates, to remedy the most fundamental problems of poverty and inequality. Historian Robert Fishman has explained: "As Howard put it, the old cities had 'done their work.' They were the best that the old economic and social order could have been expected to produce, but they had to be superseded." Fishman terms Howard's work, and that of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, "revolutionary" because they articulated comprehensive schemes for "ideal cities" that were designed to cause fundamental changes in society: "They did not seek the amelioration of the old

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Pierre Clavel

cities, but a wholly transformed urban environment.... These ideal cities are perhaps the most ambitious and complex statements of the belief that reforming the physical environment can revolutionize the total life of a society." And they believed that they had a strategy for action: "[A] 'working model' could be begun, even in the midst of the old society.... Its success would inspire emulation. A movement of reconstruction would take on momentum and become a revolutionary force in itself."11 Robert Beevers finds a comment from Howard that leaves no doubt about his intent to recast the structure of society: "Solve then the problem of how to redistribute the population and at once the whole nation will become active, alert, enterprising; and as it pours itself back in a resdess tide of energy and enthusiasm on to these waste lands of ours it will have presented to it a golden opportunity for the reconstruction of the entire fabric of our civilization.... New cities well planned and thought out because the needs of all will be considered, will displace the cities of today which are chaotic, disorderly, untidy, because founded in selfishness."12 The result was the garden city, described in To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, published in 1898.13 It is worth noting that Howard, for all his practicality, still produced an extraordinarily broad proposal. It captured all of the features noted above. The text devoted most of its pages to social and administrative schemes and only a minor part to the physical design of the garden city. Nevertheless, the diagrams are what one remembers from the book. The first diagram—the famous Three Magnets (see figs. 3-5, in chap. 1)— comes the closest to a theoretical conception of the problem. Here Howard begins from the continuum of country and city as opposite attractions: the depopulation of the countryside is the other end of a connected problem, the overcrowding of the city. But to make the colonization solution work, Howard invented the garden city, presented initially as a third "town-country magnet." Here the advantages of the city in such matters as higher wages, social opportunity, and access to capital would be combined with the advantages of the country in "beauty of nature," low rents, fresh air, bright homes and gardens, freedom, and cooperation.14 And in a final chapter on "social cities," Howard laid out the metropolitan implications of his scheme: a set of several garden cities of smaller population around a metropolitan center, itself much smaller than the industrial city but larger than the garden cities. Thus the proposal was presented in reasonably concrete form for one garden city, but its full enormity compared to the current pattern also emerged.

Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes T h e Garden City Realized—and Compromised People have commented on the pragmatism of the reform Howard sought. He thought of himself as an inventor and hoped that, once the garden city was established in one place, it would prove popular and catch on, be replicated on its merits. What happened was that, instead, parts of his idea were picked up and eventually replicated, while others failed to survive even through the execution of Letchworth, the first attempt. A central feature of Howard's scheme was common land ownership, so that the unearned increment in land values could be captured by the community. Howard and others saw this as the crux, the last element to be compromised. It was to be a feature of Letchworth, insisted on by Howard, implemented by a system of leases that would rise in value as the population and wealth of the garden city increased. But the Garden City Association was unable to raise enough capital to buy the land and build the city under these conditions; it had to borrow. Banks would not finance housing that could not be sold on the general market or leased at market rates, and so the common ownership feature was compromised. Beevers quotes one board member: [Solicitors and mortgagees, being quite uninterested in the Garden City idea, intimated that the form of lease was uncouth, that they could not in the least foresee what might happen to their security under it, and in short that they would not touch it. So these leases, of which I was myself an earnest advocate, were nearly all brought back to us with the request that we would exchange them for an ordinary 99 years lease at afixedrent, which had no doubt the theoretical disadvantages that the company had bargained away any unearned increment on that plot during that period . . . but which, nevertheless, gave practical advantages to both sides meanwhile and enabled us to get to work.15 Howard had planned for a cooperative management structure, or at least a large measure of democracy in running the garden city. His management scheme initially included a trust, which was to manage the city in all the normal city functions through a cooperative arrangement that included the residents, as well as a board of directors, whose function was to generate the capital required to build the city. In the actual practice of building and managing Letchworth, the board represented the sources of capital and would have nothing to do with a cooperative management style.16 Another feature was to be the creation of a functioning agricultural belt next

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Pierre Clavel

to the garden city and of an industrial base to provide part of the jobs the residents would depend on. Neither emerged as important parts of the garden city, in Letchworth or in most of the others that were built in succeeding years. In the case of Letchworth, agriculture was hindered by poor fertility of the land. Industrial development was constrained by the common ownership condition, and Fishman mentions the small size of the garden city labor market. These features and some others faded from the attention of garden city advocates as the century wore on. What did not fade was the idea that, on open land and freed from the constraints of existing street layouts, the garden city could achieve better design. Many of the garden city designs, once realized, were strikingly better than what most people were used to, and many enthusiasts sought to package parts or all of the garden city and market it. Mainly they needed enough capital up front, but worldwide there were hundreds of full or partial examples. In the United States the best-known postwar examples were Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland, in the 1960s.17 With, some recent exceptions, the literature of the garden city movement also came to focus on design, to the virtual exclusion of other goals.18 If common ownership was part of the package, it would be in service of design goals. If pubhe finance or regulation was to be employed, it was in service of the design. The region itself, a central city ringed by satellite garden cities as in Howard's diagram, was a design. The other features were secondary. Although Howard did not present it this way in his original book, it is apparent that, when faced with the quicker appeal the design features had to the professional planners and to investors, he compromised or lost out.

G e d d e s a n d "Civics" On the surface, Geddes and Howard were complementary. Howard was the more successful activist, Geddes the deeper theorist, a Scottish academician who began as a biologist, spent a fruitful but largely unreported middle period as a university and civic reformer, and then began, in his fifties and sixties, a highly visible and international public life with an increasing focus on city planning. The two men had much in common. They were contemporaries and absorbed many of the same formative influences in the 1880s and 1890s. When Howard adopted an idea from the milieu of British radicalism and honed it for use in the garden city scheme, Geddes typically took the same idea and gave it theoretical grounding. Like Howard, Geddes found grievous fault with the industrial city, but he put it in a classification scheme, seeing an evolution from "paleotechnic"

Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes45 to "neotechnic" types. Like Howard, Geddes thought that progress was a central feature of modern society and that the trend was toward a more cooperative system, but he grounded that thought in an elaboration of evolution theory. Like Howard, Geddes opposed the idea of class conflict as much as the industrial competition implied in the social Darwinism that was popular, but he did so out of a theory of city evolution that came from his scientific roots. Could Geddes's theoretical formulations have provided support for the larger scope of Howard's ideas, including those that were left out during the half century that saw the adoption of "new towns" as a social program in many nations? Could those efforts thus have been deepened? The potential for collaboration was there, as Geddes did provide a theoretical approach that might have elaborated on Howard's meaning of the Three Magnets and the larger program of changes entailed in the social cities—a system of cities and agricultural land making up a new kind of metropolitan area. But that potential was never realized. Typology of Cities In a series of papers tided "Civics," Geddes provided a description of city evolution from one type to another that would have informed the town-versus^ country contrast that Howard portrayed.19 He located the "country" magnet in the relatively primitive rural part of a prototypical region he called the "valley section" and at times described something like the market town characteristic of "country." At the town end of the continuum, he portrayed the industrial city as "paleotechnic," with all the negative connotations that Howard presented as the "town magnet." In this Geddes was not markedly different from other sociologists who were analyzing the city-versus-country contrast. Emile Durkheim's portrayal of "mechanical solidarity" in contrast to the more modern "organic solidarity" based on the mutual advantages of complementarity of different functions is one. Tonnies' well known "gemeinschaft" and "gesellschaft" is another.20 Geddes's discussion of city types begins from a conception of the regional spatial structure he called the "valley section." The valley section might show a variety of spatial environments determined by the topography and the rivers or transportation routes. In the first "Civics" article, he describes these environments and the locations of setdement in them: Beneath vast hunting desolations lie the pastoral hillsides, below these again scattered arable crofts and sparsely dotted hamlets lead us to the small upland village of the main glen: from this again one descends to the large and prosperous village

46

Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes

Pierre Clavel

shepherd and the poor peasant; in valley plains, the wealthy farmer; in the river settlements and by the sea, the fisherman.23 The important point about the occupation types is that Geddes maintained that they still existed, as (psychological) characterizations, in the industrial city. The hunter, then, remains as a psychology in the soldier and the policeman; the miner, accustomed to exploitation, has his counterpart in other kinds of exploiters. Geddes recognized that the basic types underwent a complex differentiation as society developed. The simpler types in the basic valley section represented a primitive phase; the more differentiated types formed the "paleotechnic" and "neotechnic" phases. The city developed analogously to the various groups, from the primitive ones associated with the village environments of the valley, to the more specialized industrial "town," to the higher form of "city." He used various names for these developments: "town" for the "paleotechnic" industrial city, "city" for the emerging "neotechnic" type. In other contexts he referred to "polis, metropolis and necropolis." He seemed to differentiate the types not only in technology but also in the way they dealt with the control of technology and the coordination of specialized occupations and institutions. Figure 13. Geddes, diagram of the valley section showing topography and symbolic occupation groups appropriate to each environment. From Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes (London: Roudedge, 1990).

of the foothills and its railway terminus, where lowland and highland meet. East or west, each mountain valley has its analogous terminal and initial village, upon its fertile and fan-shaped slope and with its corresponding minor market; while central to the broad agricultural strath with its slow meanderingriver,stands the prosperous market town, the road and railway junction upon which all the various glenvillages converge. A day's march further down and at the convergence of several such valleys stands the larger country town . . . at the tidal limit of a till lately navigable river. Finally, at the mouth of the estuary rises the smoke of a great manufacturing city, a central world market in its way.21 Geddes held that this spatial expanse illustrated the development of the civilization as shown in the largest city. "By descending from source to sea we follow the development of civilization from its simple origins to complex resultants."22 He stressed the kinds of occupation groups that, at the most primitive stage, would arise in various environments (fig. 13). There were seven basic types: in the uplands were the woodman, the miner, and the hunter; in the pastures, the

Transformation to Neotechnic City Geddes went beyond the town-country continuum, though, in positing an entirely different dimension: the way the industrial city—Howard's sink of poverty and overcrowding—might evolve into something better, which could be taken as a more elaborate version of Howard's town-country magnet, the system of garden cities described as "social cities." Geddes's "city" transcended the town-country dimension by developing conscious integrating institutions oriented to a higher level of cooperation than had persisted in the industrial metropolis of the time. The key analytical turn was identification of institutions of knowledge-storing—"the school"—as playing a vital role in reproducing and sometimes transcending the material conditions of the society; then the idea of a kind of dialectic and synthesis emerges as the collective consciousness apprehends its material circumstances and moves to transform them. The School Geddes tried to describe both the general substance and a procedure for arriving at a substantive end system, for the city and thus implicidy for the society as a whole. His main attention, which he applied differentially to his three main city types, was to the way the town reproduced itself. Was the future simply a

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Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes

Pierre Clavel

TOWN

CITY FOLK WORK

POLITY A

CULTURE

PLACE

ART

IMAGERY

LORE LEAR

V LOVE

SCHOOL

IDEA IDEAL CLOISTER

Figure 14. Geddes's diagram depicting the relationship of town, city, school, and cloister, the institutions most responsible for educating the next generation. From Patrick Geddes, "Civics," Sociological Papers 2 (1905); reproduced by permission of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. continuation of past conceptions of "what ought to be"? Or was it the application of rationality to new situations, to create new prescriptions for ordered collective response? The answer differentiated the three types. The main focus for Geddes was on the relation between institutions concerned with the day-to-day operation of the community and its specialties, and those concerned with preserving and passing on the ways these institutions operated and coordinated with one another. He tended to work out his thoughts in diagram form, which cost him some rigor, but on this topic there is a useful diagram (fig-14)- He separated those institutions concerned with "action" from those of "thought" and then created a second axis separating "rote" from "creative" thought and action. This created four types of institutions: — Town: Interacting occupations where each knows enough to continue interdependence but not to change the patterns — City: Interdependence among occupations plus enough knowledge to change and grow — School: All institutions that pass on existing knowledge (craft knowledge)

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University (Cloister): All institutions that make possible a synthesis of real-world action with ideas for changing patterns The first case was the "town," the paleotechnic society where individualism reigned and specialties were connected by the relatively primitive integration of the market, if at all. The connected institution for retention and reproduction of town institutions was the "school." "[F]rom the everyday life of action—the Town proper of our terminology—there arises the corresponding subjective WO rld—the Schools of thought, which may express itself sooner or later in schools of education. The types of people, their kinds and styles of work, their whole environment, all become represented in the mind of the community, and these react upon the individuals, their activities, their place itself."24 Most generally, Geddes used the term to refer to the "schools of thought," the subjective reflection of the activities of the "town." Most simply, school might mean the handing down of experience. The school as an organization for learning was a special case, a further development. The distinguishing feature of the school was that it was a mechanism for recording experience, but not for criticizing it or creating new ideas. There are references in the second "Civics" article that imply that the school contributes to the differentiation of occupation groups. Geddes says that it may carry out the recording of craft knowledge (that is, technology) to great lengths. But Geddes ascribes the origin of the craft knowledge to the master craftsman's originality, not to the school.25 The school, as characterized by Geddes, can primarily be seen as an unconscious mechanism for passing on traditions for the community. Somehow, despite the occupational differences that might be introduced to subjective states, the school is seen to produce a common oudook for the entire community. Geddes asserts, "[T]he types of people, their kinds and styles of work, their whole environment, all become represented in the mind of the community." This notion is that there arises a collective consciousness, in which occupational groups are represented. The collective consciousness in the school, which Geddes terms "tradition," is essential to the well-being of all residents: "[Tjradition is in the life of the community, what memory is for the individual units."26 The "school," that is, the subjective mechanisms for recording and sharing experiences, might evolve and change while remaining essentially reflective of the activity of the town. From simply recording experience in the memory of one person, the school might be handed down as tradition, then organized

50

Pierre Clavel

classes and special teachers might appear. Its limit was determined, though, by the development of the town. It produces only records, memory, custom that lies "with a weight heavy as death."27 Evolution from Town to City The school, Geddes argues, may evolve into the "cloister," and in specific cases the "university." This is a conscious mechanism. Although subjective, like the school, the cloister represents a subjectivity that is (i) critical and selective and (2) synthetic, creative of new ideas. It is the producer of science and also of ideal conceptions of the community as a whole. The school could not produce science. Being only an agency for the recording of data, it could not produce hypotheses, organizing the data and explaining them. Second, it could not produce ideals. People acted by tradition, whose origin Geddes did not try to explain by the school. Ideals were conceived as conscious goals. The "city," in contrast to the town, arose as a result of the subjective activities. The cloister, capable of science and of the formulation of ideals, was able to supply premises for action. Geddes held that the existence of the city required carrying the subjective state of the cloister one further step: to practical action. Geddes believed that scientific thought and the formulation of ideals "naturally" gave an impulse to action. When this failed to occur, the subjective world of the cloister atrophied, and the possibility of the "city" disappeared. When the subjective activity developed to the cloister, and when the ideals of the cloister became acted upon, then "the city," as Geddes defined it, was complete. This concept is perhaps an extreme possibility, an "ideal type," a situation that can occur and has occurred in the past but is not a stable thing in actuality. With all the changes involved in this transition from town to city, there is a parallel to the broader portent of Howard's whole scheme. Howard's "country magnet" and "town magnet" implied a continuum from country to city, a onedimensional concept of social change that came to dominate social thought and popular discourse, from-conceptions of evolution to the "modernization" of local government. Howard's suggestion of an alternative to these polar opposites as in the "town-country magnet" implied a different dimension of change, but the content of that dimension was only sketched in outline. Howard had only the vaguest sense of the institutional changes that might be implied. Geddes's stipulation of the role of "school" and "cloister" also provided a different dimension, but one that produced a large number of proposals for institutional development. Geddes promoted these throughout his career, before and after the statement in the "Civics" articles of 1904 and 1905.

Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes

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Geddes saw the transition from town to city, from school to cloister, in ways different from other concepts of social change and development that appeared in the same period and later. He had in mind a discontinuous evolution rather than a smoothly incremental one. He presented an idea of collective consciousness rather than individualistic adaptations. Ira Katznelson has argued critically against most of the sociological and political traditions of social change and city development, which emphasized individual and incremental change. They resulted, he wrote, in unjustified defenses of existing forms of order: pictures of differentiation that needed to be controlled.2 8 Geddes cannot be faulted on these grounds. His idea of looking at the institutions of knowledge retention and transformation in the school and the cloister is an analytical approach to social control, not an ideological one. 29 One can speculate about how this set of ideas might have helped Howard and the garden city advocates. Certainly they suggest a program for change broader than the smaller problem of designing one garden city that Howard and his supporters fixed on. These ideas would have suggested paying as much attention to the "social cities" chapter of To-morrow as to the specifics of garden city layout and finance. This sort of attention—beyond the resources and grasp of the garden city group—would have required some other group of supporters or an allied movement to emerge.

Differences b e t w e e n H o w a r d a n d G e d d e s Whatever the potential for Geddes to provide a theoretical deepening for Howard's campaign, it failed to materialize. When it came to the specifics of the garden city scheme, Geddes and Howard were mutually supportive without finding grounds for any concrete joint action or intellectual collaboration.30 Moreover, Geddes's practice of town planning went against Howard's, whatever Howard's original intent was. Where Howard sought to implement a specific plan—revolutionary in its implications, perhaps—within the system of economics and politics of the time, Geddes sought to create a social movement, which he called civics. His concept of civics was an idea of how a fundamental change in society might occur, an idea that was different from Howard's. Howard spent more than a decade devising his scheme, then sought a board of directors to raise capital and architects to produce the detailed plan for the garden city, without challenging the politics of the period. He thought the enthusiasm and civic consciousness for this would come naturally from the increasingly altruistic nature of "the right people." Geddes sought to generate civic con-

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Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes

Pierre Clavel

sciousness first, through summer meetings, university extension courses, civic exhibitions, mass-participation civic surveys, and civic museums. Geddes endorsed city planning because it was a vehicle for creating these institutions. The physical layout of the city was a means toward that end. Regional Survey These differences come to light in Geddes's more applied work. A key example is the regional survey. At the end of the second "Civics" article, Geddes addressed the ways the transition from town to city could be encouraged, beginning with the concept of citizenship: The investigation of the City thus tends towards the practice of citizenship. Thus the social survey prepares for social service, as diagnosis towards treatment and hygiene; and these react fruitfully upon our knowledge and understanding anew. Beyond social observations, and the needed observatories for making them more adequately, we need social activities and the laboratoriesforpreparing them; or again, in happier phrase, at once simple and more synthetic, we need some shelter . . . into which to gather the best seed of pastfloweringsand in which to raise and tend the seedlings of coming summers. We need definitely to acquire such a centre of survey and service in each and every city—in a word, a Civicentreforsociologist and citizen.31 Here Geddes was introducing the other side of his idea of sociology: the elaboration of the town-city, school-cloister relationship was the charting of knowledge, but "citizenship" was the way to generate the action assumed in the chart, to recruit the mass interest that would make change possible. Later, when Geddes began to apply the ideas of civics in town planning practice (after his first main effort in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1904, there were experiences in Dublin and ten years later in India), he sought to popularize the idea of the regional survey as a way into a series of citizenship-building institutions. This is logical if one shares Geddes's view of the city as a complex social form. The survey was intended to ensure that dfis complexity would be reflected in the sophistication and sensitive attention to detail in the plan. The advice that the survey should be a regional one, not confined to the city limits, also appealed to planners, who favored the comprehensive view of a natural unit not arbitrarily broken up by political boundaries. Civics as Movement The survey was also designed to generate a civics movement. It was not supposed to be the property of expert planners alone. In fact, it seems that the civic

53

movement was more important to Geddes than the plan itself. In his planning studies, for example, he managed to combine the technical planning and civic movement aims in ingenious ways. In his Dunfermline plan, he proposed that some work involved in clearing for a park be carried out by the local Boy Scouts, so that they might get experience in the detailed steps necessary for the implementation of this and, potentially, other projects.32 Most dramatic, perhaps, was the civic pageant. Geddes felt that by reenacting city history, the actors would see beyond their normally limited roles to possible cooperative projects. He had successfully used pageants when running a summer school in Edinburgh during the 1890s and later during a celebration marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of University Hall, a cooperative students' residence that he had founded in Edinburgh. Best known, perhaps, was the civic pageant and parade that he staged upon his arrival at Indore, India, in 1917, on a commission to produce plans for that city. This kind of public drama surpassed anything that city planners had developed as a mode of operation, but it intrigued many of them. Civic Museums Related, though less dramatic, was the advice that the civic survey, while partly a technical planning tool, might result in a permanent exhibition with a civic education function. Geddes himself prepared two such exhibitions, which he showed in world's fairs and various cities. He advocated that the results of the survey be permanendy institutionalized in a civic museum, which would function as a center for the transmission of civic culture. He used the Outlook Tower this way in Edinburgh. At the top one could observe the region around the city; inside were more exhibits. Conservative Surgery The plan itself was sensitive to local history in Geddes's hands. The bestknown example of such practice is carried in the concept of conservative surgery in slum-remedying schemes: rather than raze an entire neighborhood, he would recommend clearance of a small pocket to help circulation or provide a place for congregation, while the bulk of the buildings would remain and function more effectively. A major characteristic of Geddes was his attention to minute details. Anything that carried tradition stood a good chance of being left in place as a cultural object: a carved street lamp, an Indian water tank or reservoir with ceremonial functions, or a piece of good architecture. The guiding criteria were the

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Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes

Pierre Clavel

notion of the city and the neighborhood as social organisms and the attempt to let an area regenerate itself rather than replace it with an imposed design. The Geddesian Shadow Lawrence Goodwyn, in his study of the agrarian movement of the late r8oos, distinguished between the real movement and the "shadow movement" exploited by William Jennings Bryan's free silver platform in 1896. Bryan's (failed) campaign featured good oratory and some of the surface features of the populist cause but not the depth that had grown over two decades of painstaking organizing and mass participation.33 Geddes never achieved comparable mass participation, but he sought it, and he developed a planning practice that looked in that direction. And his legacy, like the populist crusade, was a shadow of what he sought. Like Howard's larger vision, Geddes's plans failed. When he began his work as a town planner after 1904, he sought earnesdy for professional legitimacy for a number of his ideas. After he prepared his plan for Dunfermline, he tried to convince the emerging planning profession to focus attention on "culture institutes" of various sorts.34 But it proved difficult for professional planners to adopt most of his ideas, because civic involvement was antithetical to professional expertise and because society was moving in a different direction. The forces that adopted the physical designs of the garden city advocates, at least in fragmented form, went against Geddes's ideas of civic museum, pageantry, and social movement. The idea of the regional survey seemed to catch on as a result of a series of articles in the first issues of Garden Cities and Town Planning (1911). But for professionals like Raymond Unwin and Patrick Abercrombie, the purpose of the survey was to give the city planner a kind of scientific standing that would set him apart from the public opinion he sought to influence. Nothing could have been further from Geddes's intent. He sought widespread participation in the survey and conceived it partly as a consciousness-raising exercise. The results of the survey were to be placed on exhibit as a permanent focus for citizen-planner interaction.35 Ironically, the Geddesian shadow sits next to the striking image of the garden city, of which dozens, even hundreds, were built, testament to the hopes of earlytwentieth-century planning and urban development. But arguably, Howard and Geddes were fundamentally different from one another, and the best thing would be to recognize in each a different tradition within the city planning

HMfe

movement and profession. They were different theoretically: if Howard had elaborated a theory, it would have put the physical design of the city in a much more prominent place than Geddes did and would have placed less emphasis on the institutions of cultural transmission and elaboration that were so important to Geddes. And their planning was different. Howard's plan for the garden cjty—schematic though it was—is one of the classics, but it put in motion a set of compromises that destroyed its larger purpose. Planning and Economic Necessity The most telling critique of the garden city idea of Howard's day comes from Robert Fishman, who had defined Howard as "revolutionary." According to Fishman, neither Howard nor his contemporaries anticipated the course of social and economic development through the twentieth century. The idea of population dispersion into a regional pattern of smaller, self-limited and selfcontained cities, Fishman argued, came to be inappropriate to the mobile, technologically advanced patterns of interaction that emerged after midcentury. A kind of fragmented spatial pattern sometimes called the "collage city" that preserved town-versus-country separation in a small-scale patchwork was what might be saved from the original idea, but not the grander sweep of "a hundred new towns," cooperative municipalism, or the "regional city" conceived by Mumford, Stein, and others in America.36 Geddes's ideas would have withstood this critique more robusdy. Against the Keynesian consumerist economic policy that emerged after midcentury, and the rough-edged attack on labor of the 1980s and 1990s, Geddes's ideas suggest a more fine-grained, producer-oriented pluralism rooted in more independent metropolitan regions. Against the growth coalition that featured massive urban renewal in city centers and mass suburbs and freeways in the periphery, Geddes's work suggests community-based organizations. Against the internationalism of corporate domination, Geddes suggests bounded economies and a moderation of scale. Against the co-optation of labor around mass production factories, Geddes suggests support for producer cooperatives. Against a university juggernaut harnessed to the interest of concentrations of wealth, Geddes laid out plans for and practiced an interactive scholarship that is still a model for what might emerge. His planning work represents a tradition and potential quite different from that of Howard: a set of proposals grounded in a theory of evolution through cooperation. But the cooperation Geddes sought had to be based on awareness

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Pierre Clavel

of how evolution had occurred both in the countryside and in the city, and it required the cultivation of history as it reposed in occupations and artifacts. Since the garden city was built in the open countryside, most of the attention Geddes would have paid to the problem of building garden cities would have to focus on the central city. That does not mean the population of the central city had to be large, but that the institutions put there had to be nourished. Complementary "culture institutes" might have been placed in the garden cities, but some reciprocal arrangement between garden city and central city would have been necessary. Lewis Mumford went a long way toward completing the ideas of regional organization that Geddes began. In The City in History, he presented an idea of the organization of "culture" among central cities and regional towns and villages that still could underpin Howard's "social cities": Scattered over France, often in remote villages and monasteries, are many superb examples of early fresco painting. Under the earlier metropolitan regime, many of these paintings would have been removed, often not without damage, from their original site and housed in a museum in Paris. This would have left a gaping hole in the place of origin, and would have deprived the inhabitants of a possession that had both communal and economic value, without providing Paris any true sense of their original setting. Today a better program has been achieved. In the Museum of Murals in the Palais de Chaillot, a large number of admirable replicas of these paintings have been brought together. In a single afternoon one may see more paintings than one could take in comfortably in a fortnight of travelling. For those who also wish a more intimate experience of the original on the site, the paintings have been identified and located: so that they have become more accessible, without their being wantonly dissociated from their original setting and purpose. This is the first step toward a more general etherialization. With color slides now available, the process could be carried even further: any small-town library or museum might borrow, and show in a projection room, an even larger collection of murals. Gone is primitive local monopoly through isolation: gone is the metropolitan monopoly through seizure and exploitation. This example will hold for a score of other activities. The ideal mission of the city is to further this process of cultural circulation and diffusion; and this will restore to many now subordinate urban centers a variety of activities that were once drained away for the exclusive benefit of the great city.37 Mumford, like Geddes and Howard, thought it possible to devise national policies different from those adopted early in the century, which set in motion

Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes what emerged at the end of it. With hindsight, we can see that they made some mistakes. Neither Howard nor Geddes foresaw the stubbornness with which elites would hold onto position and punish alternative ideas, and both were too quick to dismiss the potentials that existed in the democratic socialism that emerged, supported by massive labor organizing, in the first part of the century.38 If things had gone differendy, these opposing forces might have worked with, rather than against, both men's schemes and might themselves have been better off for the collaboration.

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CHAPTER

T h e

THREE

B o u n d e d

The Bounded City

C i t y

Robert Fishman

This rural belt surrounds the town like the walls of a medieval city. It limits its boundaries, protects it from the attack of other towns, and preserves its shape and style. c. B. PURDOM, The Garden City (r9r3)

I

Like so much of the garden city legacy, the idea of the bounded city seems simple but in fact is surprisingly complex. For Ebenezer Howard, the idea of boundedness was in large part a frontal attack on the major urban ideology of the nineteenth century: the idea, as we would say today, that "size matters," that is, that accelerating growth and giant scale are the primary measures of a city's success. The worship of size stretched from its principal altars in London, New York, Berlin, and Chicago to Sinclair Lewis's fictional small town in Main Street, where a local booster proclaims that Gopher Prairie will soon be "God bless her! just as big as Minneapolis or St. Paul or Duluth." 1 Howard's garden city, as Lewis Mumford pointed out, was a return to the Aristotelian concept that the city, like any other organism, had its proper size, and that any expansion beyond its natural limits was a self-destructive regression. Boundedness was thus an assertion of rational and humane control against the power of vast forces that threaten to destroy the city itself. But Howard added another important element to his ideal of a bounded Utopia. The garden city was also limited in size in order to concentrate and intensify the life that took place within its limits. The garden city was not only an

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escape from the overcrowded, inhuman metropolis but also a new and higher locus of urbanity, a place where a genuinely urban complexity of activities could be carried out within a human-scaled container. Thus, Howard's famous diagrams show not only suburban-style residential districts but also a "Crystal Palace" and a "Fifth Avenue" for shopping and recreation and a varied mix of industries—all within easy walking distance of all the residents. This latter aspect of boundedness has developed an unexpected resonance in recent years. In Howard's time the principal challenge seemed to be to escape from the crushing density of the centralized industrial metropolis. Now our challenge is to escape from the low-density "anti-city" (to use Mumford's term) that has sprawled out over whole regions and has de-concentrated the central cities far more radically than the garden city activists ever envisioned. In the United States, the movement known as the New Urbanism has been especially concerned with devising, on greenfield sites at the edge of regions, new towns that would nevertheless be sufficiendy dense and complex to be termed urban.2 Indeed, the garden city interpreted as a new form of genuine but bounded urbanism might be Howard's principal legacy to twenty-first-century planning. I want to begin my analysis, however, with the aspect of boundedness that seemed fundamental to Howard's contemporaries—boundedness as a critique of the ever expanding metropolis. Howard's critique, though presented with the evangelical eloquence that was his chosen style, reflects more rigorous thought about urbanism and especially the urban economy than he is usually credited with. Howard was seeking to refute the fundamental argument that the modern city was a big city because it embodied the massive scale of modern economic life. According to this argument, one might deplore the effects of metropolitan life, but to attempt to build bounded cities of 30,000 people would be as impossible as a return to the waterwheel or the hand loom. As Howard freely acknowledged, his counterargument derived largely from the American reformer Henry George and also from the now neglected English economist Alfred Marshall, whom Howard had encountered while working as a stenographer for the government commissions where Marshall had presented his ideas. 3 1 would summarize Howard's synthesis of the Henry George-Alfred Marshall critique of the unbounded late-nineteenth-century metropolis in the following terms. The large metropolis had succeeded first as the most efficient market for commodities, drawing products from the most extended hinterland and thus offering the best prices and the widest selection. But only a few urban enterprises

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Robert Fishman

were actually conducted on a scale that required massive facilities for production or distribution. Most urban businesses were small and were drawn to the big city by the external economies that derive from the clustering of many small units in dense urban neighborhoods and, above all, by the presence of a large pool of workers. But these metropolitan advantages were offset by the high rents and other inefficiencies of the great city. Urban businesses thus tended to be high-cost, undercapitalized operations that failed frequendy and even at their best offered only highly seasonal employment. Urban workers might enjoy relatively high hourly wages, but this advantage was also negated for them by the insecurity of employment in urban enterprises and by the high rents for inferior housing. Moreover, the very insecurity of the urban job market trapped workers in the most crowded slums, where they would be within walking distance of enough potential new jobs to replace the ones that they would inevitably lose. The main beneficiaries of the growth of the great city were neither the entrepreneurs or the workers but the urban landowners, who collected what George called their "unearned increment" at the price of draining productive enterprises and forcing the poorest inhabitants to pay the most (proportionately) for their unsanitary dwellings. ill 'I

As early as 1884, Alfred Marshall had suggested that the best way to break the vicious cycle of the urban economy was to move industry and employment out of the metropolis to sites that were well served by rail transportation but offered low land costs. Henry George suggested the "single tax" on rents as a more radical way of capturing "the unearned increment" for the community. More firmly than either Marshall or George, Howard grasped the full implications of their ideas for creating a new kind of city that would also embody a more just and efficient economic system. For Howard, the bounded city meant an escape from the urban high-wage, high-cost economy. In a well-planned garden city with good transportation links to the rest of the region, producers could escape the high rents and other costs of the urban core while enjoying almost the same access to goods and markets and other external economies as in the heart of the city. These savings would enable them to expand and stabilize their businesses to the point where they could offer long-term, year-round employment to workers. A garden city of 30,000 could never provide the same range of jobs as a great city, but its workers would not need that range of choices. A human-scale, bounded city could work economically for both employers and workers because it would provide enough steady work to enable workers to make a long-term commitment to the new city. Ideally, the jobs would pay a "family wage," so that the earnings of the adult male

The Bounded City

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worker could support the whole household. Even if such industries paid less per hour than they would in the metropolis (a fact that was noted in the early days of Letchworth), garden city workers would be far better off than their urban counterparts, because their real incomes would be much greater. Their housing costs would be much lower, owing to low initial land costs and good planning by garden city housing cooperatives; and their food costs would also be lower, because of products grown on the greenbelt. Most crucially for Howard, the whole community would share the "unearned increment" of increased land values, and everyone would enjoy the benefits of good planning. Thus the move from the metropolis to the bounded garden city would be an economic as much as an urban revolution. Viewed from this perspective, I believe we can see that Howard's conception was in fact prophetic of a fundamental shift for British and American workers in the years from 1890 to the 1970s, a shift that went far beyond the garden city movement as it is usually defined. For Howard was by no means the only one to grasp the advantages of decentralization both for industry and for workers. The early garden city literature frequendy cited Lever's Port Sunlight outside Liverpool and Cadbury's Bournville outside Birmingham as precursors of the garden city and proofs of its practicality.4 But beyond these and other paternal employers, the twentieth century saw a powerful movement away from the instabilities and high costs of the core urban economy and toward steady work for stable firms that tended to locate in the factory districts or satellite suburbs that gradually ringed the old urban cores.5 These districts often functioned socially and economically as bounded communities in Howard's sense. To illustrate my point, I refer to three excellent recent works by American scholars. Alexander von Hoffman's Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850-1920, deals with Jamaica Plain, located only four miles southwest of Boston's City Hall. An independent township only from 1851 to 1874, it was annexed to Boston in the latter year.Yet Jamaica Plain in von Hoffman's account was a "bounded community" through at least the 1920s, with a varied mix of local industries that supported the majority of the town's workers, as well as a mix of classes and housing types. By the 1890s Jamaica Plain residents enjoyed precisely that "marriage of town and country" that Howard promised for the garden city, with wide, tree-lined residential streets radiating out from the local main street. Jamaica Plain even had a kind of greenbelt formed by Jamaica Pond and Franklin Park, the "crowning jewel" in Frederick Law Olmsted's "emerald necklace" of parks surrounding Boston. Von Hoffman is particularly interesting when describing the variety of local

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community organizations, ranging from churches to literary and musical groups to athletic and political clubs, that flourished in the era before radio and television. This "web of neighborhood society" gave boundedness a positive meaning. This district of 30,000 people not only provided a range of job opportunities, housing types, and stores for the majority of its people; it also provided a rich and varied social life within its bounds.6 The neighborhoods of bungalows and factories in the Southwest Side district of Chicago that Alan Ehrenhalt depicts in a key section of his Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America bear litde physical resemblance to the classic garden city model, but the Southwest Side illustrates perhaps even better than Jamaica Plain the ideal of the decentralized bounded community as American workers experienced it. As Ehrenhalt shows, both the large factories that provided the bulk of the employment and their workers believed in a social contract that valued stable employment above other goals; the factories kept workers on the job even in off-season and hard times, whereas workers stayed loyal to employers even if there were better opportunities elsewhere in the Chicago region. This boundedness was echoed in consumption patterns: Chicago's downtown Loop was only a bus-ride away, but local residents dealt almost exclusively with local merchants. The area's main institution was a savings and loan, where the recycled savings of the residents enabled young couples to purchase their own homes in the neighborhood—the 1950s American version of capturing the unearned increment in land values for the community.7 Los Angeles would seem to be the last place that one would look to find the "bounded city," but Greg Hise in his Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis shows that much of that city's growth as late as the 1940s and 1950s took place in bounded communities at the city's edge. In a chapter significandy tided "The Airplane and the Garden City," Hise points out that the massive aircraft factories that flourished in Los Angeles never clustered in an old-fashioned "industrial zone" but distributed themselves around the region in a kind of circle within a radius of ten miles from City Hall. Large builders soon bought farmland close to these factories and built tract developments for the workers, which included local shopping centers and schools. Still surrounded in the 1940s and 1950s by greenbelts of open fields and orange groves, these "complete communities" flourished as essentially bounded cities until the growth of the metropolis enveloped them in sprawl.8 S

These three examples also help to explain why the bounded city broadly defined had lost its meaning in the United States by the 1970s. As I see it, the era of local attachments and the bounded city has given way to life at a regional scale,

The Bounded City

63

in which patterns of employment, consumption, and sociability are spread out over whole regions. The personal automobile has, of course, provided a powerful instrument for carrying people beyond any conceivable boundary, but (as Hise shows for Los Angeles) the bounded city and the automobile could coexist at least temporarily. More important, in my estimation, was the fundamental changes in the job market. The bounded city required that a substantial percentage of its population find long-term, steady work within its limits, and this was at least conceivable in the era of lifetime employment and the family wage. Today, we have gone back to something like the metropolitan job market at the turn of the twentieth century: jobs tend to be suddenly downsized and workers need flexibility and access to a multitude of other opportunities. In our era of the two-income household, even if one spouse found employment within the bounded city, it is highly unlikely that the other would as well. And the job within walking or bicycling distance of the home could disappear overnight, leading to a job search that inevitably would cover opportunities throughout the region. Similarly, consumption patterns have changed drastically since the period when local residents were content with the selection of goods offered at their local shopping district. The explosion of consumer lifestyles and consumer choices has meant that people consume "at the regional scale," using their automobiles to travel widely among the malls and other facilities of their regions. Finally, the range of local social life that von Hoffman shows for Jamaica Plain has not completely disappeared from American life—witness the local children's soccer leagues, which often serve as the basis of adult sociability. Nevertheless, this "web of neighborhood society" has given way to a more complex pattern in which families can virtually ignore their neighbors both by "cocooning" in their family entertainment centers and by traveling throughout their regions to socialize with others who share their specialized interests. If the fundamental conditions of the bounded city have disappeared from American life, the desire to five in a bounded city has, paradoxically, increased. The very fragmentation of lives spread out over regions, connected only by long automobile journeys on congested highways, returning to neighborhoods where the neighbors rarely see each other—this pattern has produced a yearning for a human-scaled, pedestrian-friendly community, a place with a real center and a real edge. As planners seek to envisage and even to create such places, they inevitably come back to the neglected half of Ebenezer Howard's concept of boundedness: the idea that it is possible through good planning to concentrate a varied mix of functions on a bounded site and thus produce both community and a valid form of urban complexity.

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The Bounded City

65

Ironically, the garden city-New Town movement itself neglected to develop this aspect of Howard's ideas. Concerned above all to distinguish the New Town from the old city, garden city-New Town design has, since Barry Parker's and Raymond Unwin's plan for Letchworth, emphasized loosening urban textures in favor of models drawn from the small town or the suburb. In the 1920s Clarence Stein and Henry Wright added a new element of anti-urban openness as they attempted to find room for the automobile in their "Town for the Motor Age," Radburn, New Jersey. British New Town planning after World War II firmly identified New Town design with the dispersed and the suburban.

one-sidedness neither of you do justice to the varied and complex requirements of city living.... I find a suburb of three or four thousand people, at from four to twelve people per acre, altogether charming, though I do not think that it suffices for many important human needs: but to multiply that area by twenty and call the result a new town because by travelling by bus or car, one can reach a factory center or a community center, is to remove the element of charm and create something that—though better than most parts of existing cities—is still far less than would be possible through good design, that conceived of the city in other terms than openness alone."12

Inevitably, it was Lewis Mumford who was the first to understand that the garden city-New Town movement must shift its emphasis from de-concentrating the central city and respond to the now more pressing challenge of creating real places in the midst of low-density sprawl. As early as his 1945 introductory essay to Frederic J. Osborn's new edition of Garden Cities of To-morrow (1946), Mumford cautioned against "those who mistake Howard's program for one of breaking down the distinction of town and country and turning them into an amorphous suburban mass. . . . For the Garden City, as conceived by Howard, is not a loose indefinite sprawl of individual houses with immense open spaces over the whole landscape: it is rather a compact, rigorously confined urban grouping."9

Anticipating Andres Duany's recent critique of Columbia and other American New Towns of the 1960s, Mumford in 1954 criticized "the lack of variety in the layouts [of the English New Towns], the failure to see new possibilities in grouping; and second, the absurd wastage of space in acres of unnecessary streets, too wide for any probable or tolerable traffic, with the houses set too far back from the street—as if there were no other way of ensuring privacy. .. . The overall density I consider too low, and the various neighborhoods of the New Towns are too widely scattered to fulfill the social purposes of living together in an urban community."13

Unfortunately, Mumford was so concerned to maintain the outward unity of the embattled New Town cause that he confined his increasingly sharp critiques of British New Town design largely to the letters he exchanged with Osborn, the "grand old man" of the British New Town movement. As he observed to Osborn in 1963, "[Y]ou stated the real difference between your point of view and my own, in that you make the 'end product, for which almost everyone makes any effort, is the life in and centering on the home.' I don't think you do complete justice to yourself in holding to this position, for if this is all you want Los Angeles, rather than the New Towns, should be your goal, or that even more spread-out suburban nightmare which we find growing up in the rural no-man's land of Megalopolis. In contrast to your position I regard home, neighborhood, city and region as on a parity with regard to their purposes and functions."10 For neighborhood and city to fulfill their urbanizing and civilizing functions, Mumford insists that the New Towns need both a density and a pedestrian scale that the English models were lacking. As early as 1957, he complained to Osborn, "[T]he new towns have, oddly enough, lost their pedestrian scale."11 In a further and more elaborate critique, he wrote to Osborn, "Le Corbusier . . . makes a fetish of uniform high density, you of uniform low density, and in that

Mumford, of course, continued to the end of his life to believe that "living together in an urban community" was compatible with the limits of a bounded community, that New Towns could be planned to be real cities that provide what he calls "the human drama": for, as he observed, "only in a city can a full cast of characters be assembled; hence only in a city is there sufficient diversity and competition to enliven the plot and bring the performers up to the highest pitch of skilled, intensely conscious participation."14 This was the hope that Jane Jacobs subjected to withering criticism in her Death and Life of Great American Cities, where she argued that Ebenezer Howard "simply wrote off the intricate, many-faceted, cultural life of the metropolis."15 For Jacobs, the urban drama—even the "ballet" of a single street—required the scale of the great metropolis. And Jacobs' critique of Howard and Mumford is being carried on today by those like Edmund Bacon who charge that the New Urbanism has wrongly usurped the tide of urbanism; that bounded communities on greenfield sites will necessarily be anti-urban in lifestyle regardless of the best intent of the designers; and that such updated versions of the garden city will only further weaken the only urbanism we actually possess: the fragile urbanism of the big city.16 As a student of Howard and Mumford and as a card-carrying member of the Congress of the New Urbanism, I can only assert that some version of Howard's

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defense of "bounded urbanism" seems perhaps more relevant now than a hundred years ago. If urbanity is to survive in the decentralized society that has triumphed throughout the developed world, it can no longer be tied to the fate of the big city alone: it must be present at many points throughout the region. This seems to me to be the aim of the best of the New Urbanism, which seeks in the midst of suburban sprawl to create places that meet Mumford's definition of a "compact, rigorously confined urban grouping." What Jacobs praised as "the intricate, many-faceted life of the metropolis" need not be limited to Greenwich Village or its equivalents at the urban core. It might be achieved at many points in the region in places that combine the pedestrian scale and vitality of the best urban neighborhoods with rapid, efficient transit ties to the core. This "decentering" of urbanism can perhaps best be seen in California architect Peter Calthorpe's "transit-oriented development," a concept he helped to apply to the Pordand, Oregon, region.17 Calthorpe's idea is to limit new development wherever possible to sites that are within walking distance of a transit stop. In Pordand these would be stops on the new light-rail lines coming out of the downtown. These "transit-oriented developments," or TODs, would feature a variety of housing types, jobs, shopping, public spaces, and pedestrianoriented streets—all within 2,000 feet of the transit stop. But Calthorpe well understands that such places can never be fully "urban" on their own. Instead, urbanity resides at the scale of the region: the TODs reinforce downtown, which provides those unique facilities that can only thrive at the regional core. Calthorpe is arguably rethinking and reinventing Ebenezer Howard's Social City diagram (see fig. 2, above), which was also an acknowledgment of the limitations of the individual garden city and the need to create urbanism on the regional scale through a "Central City" in close touch with smaller garden cities. The decentralization of the nineteenth-century metropolis, which Howard was among the first to foresee, has meant the end of the dream of the self-contained garden city; but, as Mumford always insisted, a proper understanding of the complexity of Howard's original vision suggests the possibilities for a more complex pattern of regional development. Not only did Howard seek to reinvigorate urbanism by spreading urbanity throughout the region; in addition, he imagined a "garden region" built on a careful balance of a core city and the garden cities. The great design challenge of the twenty-first century therefore remains what Howard proclaimed more than a hundred years ago: "Town and Country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization."18

CHAPTER

FOUR

G r e e n b e l t s R e g i o n a l

in

C i t y

a n d

P l a n n i n g

Robert Freestone

To dunk of greenbelts is to think inescapably of Ebenezer Howard, British town and country planning, and the London Green Belt. Yet both theoretical and practical applications and developments of the greenbelt idea have been diverse. The classic original idea of a penumbral green zone can be linked meaningfully to many related concepts of open space planning from parkways to park systems.1 The shape, rationale, and effectiveness of the circumferential greenbelt have varied over time. Planning historian Peter Hall distinguishes between two extremes: a narrow belt versus a broader band preserving countryside in toto. In between are many forms linked to objectives as diverse as urban containment, protection of community identity, provision of greater recreational opportunities, preservation of the agricultural economy and rural ways of life, natural and cultural heritage conservation, and minimization of air and water pollution. Particular circumstances of urbanization, environmental constraints, planning fashion, and, importandy, site and situation, have produced a multiplicity of responses. If there is one common thread, it has been to ensure, in Ebenezer Howard's terms, that the best qualities of town and country are not "destroyed by the process of growth."2

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70

Robert Freestone

This chapter traces the evolutionary diversity of greenbelt thinking from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. Eschewing a detailed definitional or etymological discussion, it presents a broadly chronological typology of ideas (by no means mutually exclusive) with the intention of capturing diverse historical responses to, and the contemporary possibilities of, the greenbelt idea in time and space. The matrix in table i provides the framework for discussion. The main interest here is greenbelts as agents of metropolitan and regional structuring, rather than open space design, land use problems of the rural-urban fringe, or general town-greening strategies. Some familiar landmarks in planning history will guide the way, with examples drawn from the English-language planning literature, mainly from Britain, the United States, and Australia. The larger findings that emerge from this historical perspective are the diversity,flexibility,fecundity, and adaptability of greenbelt thinking, the strengths and weaknesses of different paradigms, the belated emergence of an environmental consciousness injecting new meanings and challenges into greenbelt city thinking, the desirable nexus between growth and place management, and the continuing relevance of Howard's legacy.

I11

T h e Parkland T o w n The ideal of a band of un-built-on land surrounding a town, firmly demarcating its outer boundary and limits to growth, is a premodern arrangement with a lineage stretching back to ancient civilizations. The parkland belt was a foundational element of colonial setdement planting and town planning. John Reps rediscovered the importance and likely influence of the model colonial town template in The Friend of Australia. All the entrances to this ideal rectilinear town would be through a peripheral parkbelt of about one to two miles wide, "save and excepting such sides as are washed by a river or lake." The benefits of this reservation were threefold: it would contribute to "the health and pleasure of the inhabitants," it would "render the surrounding properties beautiful," and it would bestow "a magnificent appearance" to the town. In practice, such parkland could also take on a defensive function, both as a green moat against marauding hordes and as a moral repellent against the unwanted intrusion of any indigenous, lower-status culture, as was the case in New Delhi.3 The showpiece of systematic colonization is the 1837 layout of Adelaide, a brilliant "blend of order and opportunism" conventionally attributed to William Light, the first surveyor general of South Australia. Its conventional gridiron I'll II

Greenbelts in City and Regional Planning

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plan betrays a formula decided in London even before the site was selected. But its breaking apart (with one-third of the required r,ooo acres of town lands placed north of the Torrens River), the river floodplain kept free of development, various fragments and jagged edges arranged to fit topography and oudook, and the whole encircled by green, together indicate a creative on-the-spot response to actual site conditions.4 Growth pressures and land speculation have whitded away the original belts of peripheral commons of colonial planted towns. Despite incursions from public institutions and railway lines, Adelaide remains the most intact, with about 75 percent of the original 930-hectare reservation remaining as parkland. More impressive in regional if not world terms was the stamping of the South Australian rural landscape through the second half of the nineteenth century with hundreds of little Adelaides. A threefold morphological division of town, parkland, and suburban land in these government "parkland towns" was codified by State Surveyor General G. W. Goyder in the 1860s. As government-owned land, the parkland was envisaged as providing for general public and recreational uses. That function has been exploited in many different ways through time, as the parkland has accommodated racecourses, swimming pools, show grounds, lawn bowling greens, camping areas, golf courses, and more utilitarian uses like railway tracks, rubbish dumps, slaughterhouses, and even sewage treatment plants.5

T h e Garden City Ebenezer Howard's concept of the early industrial town surrounded by an agricultural belt with town and country clearly defined has attracted an extraordinary literature and had an even more important environmental planning legacy. In Howard's ideal urban landscape, first sketched in To-morrow (1898), towns would be of limited size with a hard edge of country preventing lateral spread. Long-term urban growth would be directed to, and contained within, clusters of "shunless, smokeless cities" (see fig. 2, above). This polycentric configuration dubbed "the Social City" would be enshrined by later generations of city and regional planners as a normative model of urban form on efficiency, equity, and environmental grounds.6 In Howard's original treatise, there was more garden than city. The garden city consumed a land area of 1,000 acres within a surrounding rural estate of 5,000 acres. The "garden" setting was predominandy rural and institutional— an agricultural belt. Howard's book takes the reader through the economics of

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the rural estate in tedious detail. Like many of his contemporaries, Howard was preoccupied with the "land question," which revolved around issues of rural depopulation and the destabilization of traditional modes of rural life. But his solution for saving the countryside substituted a long-range setdement solution for traditional "back to the land" remedies. The town would provide a proximate market for agricultural produce. Farmland would be fertilized by the disposal of human waste, while rural life would be enriched by the increased accessibility of urban amenities. In typical Victorian fashion, Howard's famous diagrams show a profusion of things in the rural hinterland: not just large farms and rural smallholdings, but also sundry charitable and philanthropic institutions. Nonurban space in Howard's urban system was "fully utilized for civilized purposes" and "not free to run wild." Waterfalls in his 1898 Social City diagram are the sole natural feature highlighted. Yet Howard's marriage of town and country reveals a deeper intellectual tradition holding that the fullest possibilities of humankind could be realized only through direct communion with nature. His famous "Town-Country" magnet diagram (see fig. 5, above) codified the desirable environmental qualities of the countryside, such as "Beauty of Nature," "Fresh Air," and "Bright Sunshine." With flowery prose, conjuring Gainsborough-like word pictures of rural England, Howard hyperbolizes "the bosom of our kindly mother earth, at once the source of life, of happiness, of wealth, and of power." The rural estate offers a prospect of "beautiful vistas, lordly parks, violet-scented woods, fresh air, sounds of rippling water."7 Although town and country were united in Howard's vision, they would be spatially distinct. Garden cities grew by replicating themselves, not by sprawling in the normal fashion onto surrounding agricultural land, ever rising in value and'ripe for conversion. The principle of growth was "always preserving a belt of country round our cities." Howard even reproduced the plan of Adelaide to illustrate the idea of leaping over "Park Lands" to establish new growth points. The key to retaining the integrity of the belt as a whole was communal ownership. Thus not only would the "beauty and healthiness" of the town be preserved, but residents would enjoy "all the fresh delights of the country—field, hedgerow, and woodland."8 As a cavalier, kitchen-table Utopian, Howard conceded no potential conflicts in the physical, functional, and environmental partnership of town and country, and he duly set about establishing Letchworth as a "working model" of a towncountry magnet north of London. In the early years, the rural dimension was an integral component of the whole experiment. For many years plans of Letch-

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worth showed the whole Garden City estate, and hence the town in relation to its agricultural belt. Thomas Adams, the first estate manager and a former Scottish dairy farmer, was committed to the idea of an agricultural belt "occupied by a sturdy and independent yeomanry." In 1904 he organized a conference on the garden city and agriculture at Letchworth. The nurturing of smallholdings was discussed, but development of the estate tended to be rather ad hoc. Viability was hampered by farmland of poor to average quality and by the acute undercapitalization of First Garden City, Ltd. 9 Things have obviously improved. By the late 1990s the Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation could report that its two farms were generating annual profits of £70,000. But this was set against total revenue from estate administration of nearly £6 million. This illustrates a broader trend through the twentieth century for town to overwhelm country in the putative synthesis of town and country planning. The significance of the rural dimension has been downplayed, as planning has focused more and more on city and suburb. Countryside problems became separated from urban ones and relegated to secondary status. And the idea of the agricultural belt metamorphosed into a more generic buffer of green.10

Parkbelts Howard's "correct principle of a city's growth" applied to the spawning of new cities but was eminendy adaptable to existing urban growth patterns. In this context, as a simple geometric model of organic spatial order, it was stripped of its original and radical social content. The agricultural belt became open space, its major function being to define and differentiate urban communities in the penumbral region of large metropolitan centers. In time, this concept of the greenbelt as parkbelt—a mere "community separator"—became closely associated with the satellite town and suburb concept, but early applications were modest in scale and ambition. The definitive theoretical exposition of town development by means of "selfcontained suburbs with defining belts of open space" was by the leading British planner-architect Raymond Unwin, notably in Town Planning in Practice (1909) and Nothing Gained by Overcrowding (1912). His parkbelts assume different guises depending on location and include narrow belts of woodland, avenues of trees, playing fields, and agricultural land. There is incidental recognition of intrinsic ecological value in the possible preservation of "haunts for birds and flowers."11 Peter Hall provides a string of examples of such narrow parkbelts dividing ex-

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isting from new communities at Unwin and Parker's New Earswick, Ealing Garden Suburb in London, Margaretenhohe in Germany, and Ernst May's new suburban housing estates in Frankfurt. The idea has been widely applied, but a classic example of this "correct principle" on the scale envisaged by Howard and Unwin was the 1925 master plan for suburban expansion through local councilcontrolled territory in Perth, Western Australia. The plan for undeveloped territory between the existing city and the coasdine, substantially realized, envisaged two townships self-contained for everyday social life, linked by parkways but divided by a zone of permanendy reserved open space to prevent "straggling setdement."12

Green Girdle The green-girdle form of parkbelt is a narrow, circumferential, possibly discontinuous chain of open spaces at the extremity of large cities. The intention was to inject some rationality into the pattern of outer expansion, provide an outer lung for residents, and promote recreational opportunities that might otherwise be forgone in low density sprawl. Unwin was again the key theorist in the English-speaking world, taking his inspiration partly from the landscape possibilities that accompanied the demolition and removal of the fortification rings around ancient continental towns.13 Charles Reade, the first government town planner of South Australia, and a former emissary for the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, floated the concept of an "outer belt of park lands and parkway boulevarde" for metropolitan Adelaide. The proposal is revealing of how—far from being an icon of urban planning as singled out by Howard—long-term growth in the Adelaide basin even before the 1920s was set in the direction of low density sprawl and scatter. Since then, the goal of creating an outer parkland belt has been a touchstone of metropolitan planning in Adelaide.14 Examples of the concept recur in London planning projects during the decades leading up to the heroic greenbelt scheme associated with Patrick Abercrombie in the 1940s. At the turn of the twentieth century, William Bull with Lord Meath, chairman of the London County Council's Parks and Open Space Committee, first proposed a tree-lined circumferential parkway to encircle the capital. At the 1910 London Town Planning Conference, George Pepler mooted a similar "parkway green-girdle." Unwin's work for the Greater London Regional Planning Committee from the late 1920s involved the investigation of al, 111 " I I; I

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Robert Freestone

ternative "pattern and background" configurations of development and open space. The green girdle was the most realistic option: a reservation of public lands providing "as complete a break as possible in the continuous building expansion around the metropolis."15 The green girdle idea was taken up by the London County Council from 1935 and enshrined in the Green Belt (London and Home Counties) Act of 1938, which authorized counties surrounding London to acquire suitable land with contributions of up to 50 percent from the County Council. Based essentially on drainage patterns, significant land tracts were assembled, but high land costs impeded continuation. Always a "second best" option for Unwin, compared to more extensive countryside reservation, the scheme did not prove to be a robust planning model; it "was really a matter more of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted."16

Parkways and Greenwebs Moving into the city proper, the idea of separating—and linking—urban districts with strands and shards of open space finds its modern genesis in the American park movement. Parkways were a distinctive American invention. The seminal work is found in the integrated open space networks of Olmsted, Vaux, and Company in the second half of the nineteenth century. Planned open space could bring the country into the town, provide breathing space amid dense living areas, increase access to recreational opportunities, and better unify urban space.17 The classic open air laboratory was Boston. A park system was early advocated by landscape architects like H. W S. Cleveland, but Frederick Law Olmsted took the initiative. Olmsted's "emerald necklace," an inner chain of naturalistic open spaces linking Franklin Park to the Charles River, conceived in the r88os, was the jewel in the crown. Like Howard, Olmsted believed that city dwellers needed direct contact with nature to preserve their physical and mental health. Charles Eliot extended the idea to the outer city. His Massachusetts Trustees of Public Reservations (1891) and later gubernatorial and metropolitan park commissions, government departments, and local land trusts have worked over many decades to realize the "interconnected outer necklace" of what is now described as the "bay circuit."18 Other planners in other cities elaborated the parkway on a metropolitan scale in the early twentieth century. John C. Olmsted conceived an integrated system of parks and parkways for Seatde in 1903. The diffusion of parkway systems into

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mainstream city planning is confirmed by the treatment of regional open space in Daniel Burnham and E. H. Bennett's Plan of Chicago of 1909, which recommended regional forest preserves to maintain urban separation in suburban Cook County. The form and extent of these reservations were also an influence on Raymond Unwin's thinking.19 However, parkways often remained fragmentary, linear forms, more "way" than park, and sometimes favoring certain sectors of the metropolis over others by reason of topographic suitability and social class. A breakthrough international plan, which assembles these elements and relates them to a wider understanding of urban form and growth delineation, is Fritz Schumacher's plan for Cologne, the most detailed plan for any German city in the 1920s. The foundation for the plan was Mayor Konrad Adenaur's 1918 intervention ensuring that 50 percent of the city's relict inner ring of fortifications would be maintained as open space and that an outer ring would be preserved totally as an area of scenic beauty and recreation. Although guided by the conventional notion of the city as an organism, Schumacher eschewed traffic as the planning framework in favor of a regional matrix of green based on interconnecting the two historic ringsqua-belts of fortification by "radial strips of verdure" and walkways.20 By the 1940s the idea of utilizing greenwebs to define community and neighborhood boundaries within the urban fabric was installed in mainstream planning consciousness, and it endures into the New Urbanism. However, parkway and greenweb systems are not necessarily growth management tools.21

G r e e n Backcloth

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Greenbelts in City and Regional Planning often "cities of health" ringing London, Gustav Langer's 19 n proposal in Berlin, and Charles Purdom's prescient conceptualization of satellite town policy in the 1920s. By the t93os, even a trenchant critic of residential development on garden city lines like Thomas Sharp could, hail the satellite method as "the one rational and civilized method" of urban growth. By the 1950s it was "baptized for the atomic age" as a model of dispersal and recentralization reducing the "target attractiveness" of large cities. Its star waned only when the tidal flood of metropolitan growth in the 1960s began to overwhelm its neat symmetrical division between town and country, although early realization of its practical limitations does not appear to have dimmed its theoretical appeal.23

G r e e n b e l t Cities The greenbelt city idea is a classic mid-twentieth-century planning ideal deserving of fuller discussion. Up to the early 1930s, urban growth and population size were direcdy linked to prosperity, but official attitudes changed in the wake of the Great Depression, which helped foster a regional appreciation of the interconnectedness of urban and rural problems. Infused with the idealism of the New Deal, the three American Greenbelt Towns developed by Rexford Guy Tugwell's Resettlement Administration in 1938 were crucial transadantic links between the original garden city idea and the wider possibilities of a stateassisted New Towns policy. Permanent greenbelts as either farming zones or preserves for the "out-of-doors" were an integral component, and at Greenbelt, Maryland, a remnant greenbelt remains to "separate the community from the undifferentiated housing developments that surround it." 24

To deal with the problem of town extension beyond the urban fringe, various physical planning models have been propounded, from linear to ring cities. The form closest to the garden city tradition is a logical extension of Unwin's preWorld War I notion of the parkbelt. It conceptualizes long-term metropolitan growth as best directed to making new or expanded existing setdements selfcontained communities limited in size and situated against an extensive backdrop of green—effectively a fusion of individual greenbelts forming what Hall terms a green backcloth. This is the satellite town system: whole federations of communities studding the countryside, rather like pool balls on a tabletop of green baize.22

From the late 1930s, the spatial redistribution of growth became an article of faith. To accomplish the planned decentralization of population and economic activity, the archetypal greenbelt was enshrined as a broad cordon sanitaire "separating the threatened countryside from the threatening town." It reached its practical zenith in Britain but was nonetheless exported around the world through colonial and postcolonial networks of decision-making and influence. Integrated with related ideas such as satellite communities, neighborhood units, central city redevelopment, and freeway networks, it contributed to a remarkably standardized international vocabulary of planning in the early post-World War II period.25

This planetary model has been adopted, adapted, and imposed in coundess settings through the twentieth century. It is there in Arthur Crow's 1910 vision

Underlying the use of greenbelts is an array of specific objectives, the importance and interdependence of which have fluctuated through time in re-

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sponse to the pace and nature of urbanization, the perceived importance of town versus country in public policy, the changing political climate, and an evolving environmental agenda. The aims—the positive claims for them—include the checking of suburban sprawl and premature subdivision; dampening land speculation; stimulating urban infill; protecting agricultural land, tourist, and scenic resources; promoting recreational opportunities; preserving town character and identity; promoting proximity to rural life; providing greenfield sites for particular institutions; and conserving flora and fauna. The historical record of achievement is complex. Put crudely, in some places these kinds of greenbelts have worked; in others they have not. At some times they have been the right prescription, and at others their rationale and relevance can be questioned. Their longevity has depended on critical exogenous factors such as political will, popular support, and the dynamism of regional economies as much as on the efficacy of the planning instruments used to designate and protect them. Everywhere and at every time there have been strong pressures to diminish and fragment greenbelts for other purposes. The fate of Sydney's greenbelt is perhaps typical of those featured in many first-generation metropolitan strategies conceived within the idealism of late1940s postwar reconstruction. The primary purpose of the 332-square-kilometer cordon of nonurban land—virtually an inner rural zone—was to prevent "promiscuous urbanization." It defined the physical limit of the continuously built-up metropolitan area for the planners' target population of 2.3 million. The primary planning control preventing subdivision of land into allotments less than 2 hectares in area inevitably proved controversial as home-owners and landowners complained about heavy-handed government restriction of their property rights. But the real time bomb ticking away through the 1950s was a rate of population growth far in excess of what the planners had predicted. As early as 1954 the postwar baby boom and an expansive national immigration policy that favored big cities like Sydney meant that the growth rate far exceeded early predictions. Bowing to pressure from public housing authorities and private land interests, the state government in 1959 slashed the greenbelt to a third of its original size, effectively killing both the concept and the authority that had conceived it. As the mood shifted to planning arrangements that facilitated growth, the only gain for Sydney was a new regime of infrastructure contribution charges for developers. An epitaph in a swansong publication, Sydney's Green Belt (1963), is almost pathetic: "The Green Belt is much more like a 'nature strip'—the vital residue of the early days of our history when wide open spaces could be taken for granted."26

Greenbelts in City and Regional Planning Greenbelts were a mainstay in postwar urban and regional planning in many regimes. In Russia, for example, while generally considered successful, their integrity was under constant assault from authorities overriding local jurisdictions to site facilities as well as the unavoidable dacha settlements of the privileged class. Greenbelts were a feature of first-generation metropolitan strategies in Asia inspired by British town and country planning ideals, but very few Asian cities maintain greenbelts or have other policies that effectively limit outward growth. Tokyo's abandonment of its greenbelt policy in the mid-1960s is a notable failure. Seoul in South Korea is an exception. However, a liberalization of policy there in the lead-up to the 1988 Olympic Games had disastrous results with rising land prices, decline in affordable housing stock, annexation of agricultural land, and destruction of the physical and social fabric of traditional setdements through gentrification. Although it originally occupied twice as much land as that reserved for metropolitan development, Seoul's greenbelt now faces intense urbanization pressures.27 The British experience with greenbelt cities dominates the planning literature. Its intellectual origins lie in the work of Ebenezer Howard, Raymond Unwin, Frederic J. Osborn, Charles B. Purdom, and Patrick Abercrombie, allied to numerous midcentury government reports on planned decentralization. The greenbelt is now ensconced as "the first article of the British planning creed." In i960 an estimated 6 percent of England was covered by greenbelt proposals. By 2000 the percentage had doubled, representing over 1.5 million hectares of protected land and some fourteen separate approved greenbelts. The most famous and prototypical greenbelt was the centerpiece of Abercrombie's Greater London Plan 1944-45 (nS- I5)- The original greenbelt ring has been progressively widened from 5 to 15 miles in depth. 28 The rise of the British greenbelt rests on several factors, but bipartisan political support is surely the most crucial. The greenbelt came under threat during the Thatcher years when deregulation of planning controls became de rigueur. But many Tory voters were greenbelt dwellers and sympathizers, able to organize themselves into powerful NIMBY lobbies. Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair is the latest to affirm that his government had no intention of scything through greenbelts. Greenbelts are said to be "practically the only electoral issue on which all political parties agree, including the Green Party." They are able to transcend local tensions by a kind of mystical, symbolic status, which deems them capable of delivering all things to all people.29 The objectives (and exact wording) of British policy have evolved through different planning climates since the 1940s. The aim of preserving the "special

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character" of places (in the words of the original Government Circular 42/55) was largely for the benefit of historic towns like York and Oxford (fig. 16). The 1984 idea of assisting "urban regeneration" was a historical paradox given that greenbelt policy originally aimed at encouraging the dispersal of development. The idea of "safeguarding the countryside from encroachment" (1988) is also

intriguing as the first explicit mention of a rural as opposed to an urban objective. A dominant "pastoral aesthetic" endures.30 Positive legacies of greenbelt policy emerge from detailed research. A major study undertaken in the 1980s demonstrated that greenbelts had slashed the rate of conversion of rural to urban land, curbed the worst excesses of scattered development, ensured the physical separation of urban areas, and supplied more recreation facilities. They had not significandy stopped or slowed the pace and rate of decentralization, but they had been crucial in shaping its spatial outcome. A follow-up study in the 1990s documented regional differences in policy formulation, considerable diversity in approaches to development control, and numerous problems and challenges in the implementation of national policy at the local level. But the major conclusion was that two primary purposes of greenbelts—checking unrestricted sprawl and preventing towns from merging—-were being achieved, and at the same time the countryside was being safeguarded from gross encroachment.31 Set against policy objectives, criticisms of greenbelts in practice provide a more subde appreciation of the contemporary strengths, limitations, problems,

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and challenges of this policy approach. From a wide array of planning studies, not only British, several recurring themes surface. They are distilled below into ten major concerns. 1. I"

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Greenbelts increase land and house prices. By restricting the supply of land, greenbelts can increase urban land and house prices in advance of the general price level.32 Greenbelts can protect land of average environmental quality. Significant portions of greenbelt can be of inferior quality—infertile, dreary, poorly maintained, and even derelict. Greenbelts increase car travel. If greenbelts lead to the outward displacement of new housing but not jobs, they can increase transportation costs because of the greater distances people have to commute. Provision of outer beltways and orbital roads further encourages dispersion. The implication is that greenbelt policy may actually conflict with principles of sustainable development.33 Greenbelts divert development deeper into the countryside. An extension of this criticism is the argument that greenbelts not only extend sprawl beyond a sacrosanct protected area but may redirect development to locations of high environmental quality. Greenbelts increase development pressures within existing centers. Because of land scarcity, residential sites are developed at higher density within existing urban areas. The result can be increased traffic congestion and diminution of environmental quality, even loss of conservation values. Historically, greenbelt policy combined with government housing subsidies, progress in building technology, the machinations of turf politics, and the planning ideology of comprehensive redevelopment contributed to Britain's high-rise housing boom through the 1960s.34

6.

Greenbelts can have a range ofunpredictable effects. Greenbelts can have unintended, counterintuitive implications. Narrow greenbelts between urban centers can lose their scenic amenity and become lifeless communication corridors, agricultural land can be sterilized through the ossification of small lot size and fragmented ownership, and the development of high-rise apartments on the periphery can become a profitable form of property development.35

7.

Greenbelts do not necessarily increase public access to nonurban land. Another paradoxical outcome is that greenbelt land is not necessarily more ac-

Greenbelts in City and Regional Planning

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cessible to urban residents, particularly if it remains in private ownership. Positive measures are needed to create better access and opportunities for informal recreation. Greenbelts are not always environmentally just. Residents without cars may not easily access land on the periphery. Greenbelts can promote rural gentrincation, enshrining greenbelts as areas of privilege resistant to change—even that necessary for the viability of the local farm economy. For example, one scholar characterizes Boulder, Colorado, as "an exclusionary largely middle-class city" because of its greenbelt strategy.36 Greenbelts are a negative and inflexible means ofdevelopment control. Because of the lack of positive and flexible powers to respond to the subdeties of new forms of development, rural diversification, and environmental improvement, greenbelt policies may be better at fossilizing relict landscapes than promoting innovative and sensitive change. It is ironic that Letchworth, embedded within London's Green Belt, can no longer grow by cellular extension as Howard envisaged.37 10. Greenbelts do not constitute a regional settlement strategy. First promoted in an era of slow, incremental growth, and seemingly based on a monocentric model of urban form, greenbelts are rooted in a physical planning tradition that belies the logistical complexity of the modern city region. The functional growth of cities has been less well contained than physical spread. To be most effective, greenbelts can only be one element of wider regional physical, economic, and environmental planning strategies 38 Each of these criticisms is incontrovertible. Yet all can be addressed and debated in a policy sense. For example, greenbelts do affect land prices, but this is precisely the aim of a regional urban containment policy: to eliminate speculation of greenbelt land for nonfarm purposes. Also, there are factors more important than greenbelts in the emergence of complex, long-distance commuting patterns. The evidence suggests that containment does promote more sustainable development patterns in transport terms, certainly far more than alternative development strategies that have been advanced to deal with the "metropolitan flood." An overall summation of policy is problematical, because of the uncertainty of direct and indirect effects, interconnectedness of outcomes, and the interrelationship of policies; evaluation must be time- and place-specific.

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G r e e n Wedges and Corridors Still another variation on the classic greenbelt idea is the corridor-and-wedge form of development. Pardy an adaptation of garden city thought, its representation on a metropolitan scale helped prompt reconsideration of meanings of open space in modern city and regional plans. Charles Reade was probably typical of the planning missionaries reevaluating the green-agricultural belt idea in the interwar era. Concerned generally with better adapting generic planning formulas to the circumstances of particular places, and specifically with the effects of restrictive belts on housing density and quality, Reade came to favor staged growth along corridors specified in town extension plans. In this model, a portion of the greenbelt becomes a holding belt for later development. Reade's thinking was influenced by Thomas Adams, by then attached to the Canadian Commission of Conservation and confronting similar constraints in Canadian town extension (fig. 17). In the late 1920s, Adams' proclivity toward the facilitation of growth would lead to a monumental blowup with Lewis Mumford over the expansionism of the New York Regional Plan. 39 Also aligned closely with the British town and country planning tradition, George Pepler put forward an ideal town plan that integrated wedge parks and parkways within the confines of an "an inviolable Green Belt of open country." Bolder corridor-and-wedge city forms emerged on the Continent, notably Eberstadt, Mohring, and Petersen's submission to the 1910 Greater Berlin Competition, which organized growth into sectors with alternating wedge-shaped green zones penetrating close to the city center. The most famous metropolitan plan of this genre was the Copenhagen "Finger Plan" of the late 1940s. The same concept influenced the planning of Greater London, indeed all of southeast England in the late 1960s and early 1970s, although in these "super-Abercrombie" plans, the famous London greenbelt basically remains intact.40 An influential critique of early radial-corridor thinking was by William H. Whyte in The Last Landscape (1968). Singling out the 1961 National Capital Plan for Washington, D.C., as the archetypal "Year 2000 Plan," Whyte reiterated the planners' familiar and sensible objectives: injecting "order and form" to the region, promoting mass transportation, maximizing access to the central area, and preserving significant stretches of countryside. The geometric form to translate these goals into reality was more contestable, with huge expanses of blank "wedge land," which obscured land character and included large tracts neither

Figure ij. From greenbelts to green wedges: Thomas Adams' plan to loosen the "straight-jacket" of the greenbelt to alternating wedges of agricultural and urban land. From Thomas Adams, "Reserving Productive Areas within and around Cities: A Proposal to Substitute Agricultural Wedges for Zones," Journal of the American Institute of Architects 9 (Oct. 1921): 318.

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productive nor scenic. This was modernist master planning at its regional zenith: expansive, abstract, lacking detail, spatially wasteful, and impossible to implement. Whyte advanced another form of open space planning that took its cue "from the patterns of nature itself—the water table, the flood plains, the ridges, the woods, and, above all, the streams." These were values that would become more highly esteemed in the following decade.41

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T h e Regional City A sophisticated modern adaptation of Howard's original Social City landscape was what Clarence Stein termed the "regional city." This comprised galaxies of modest-sized communities (not satellite towns) linked by modern means of transportation but divided by open spaces "for farmland, recreation area, or natural woodland."42 The concept crystallizes early in the work of Patrick Geddes, a product of his protoconservationist respect for existing built fabric, cultural textures, and natural environments. In Cities in Evolution (1915), he calls for preserving "the remains of hills and moorlands between the rapidly growing cities and conurbations of modern industrial regions" to provide water, recreation, and "natureaccess." The famous regional planning scheme prepared for Doncaster and district in 192 2 by Patrick Abercrombie and Henry Johnson demonstrates a similar response to "special topographical circumstances." A fragmented scatter of isolated, virtually satellite pit-head villages is reconceptualized into a dispersed city, "neither swollen nor tentacular," with parkway interconnections across open country, much of it flood-prone. Abercrombie felt it was his best project in constructive regional planning.43 Stein's regional city (fig. 18), bound together by Benton MacKaye's "townless highways," was an alternative to the problem of "limidess agglomeration." The Piedmont Crescent cities in North Carolina provided a real-life illustration of such "an interwoven urban-rural complex." The great open spaces ("protective area of natural green") separating his moderate-sized and functionally specialized communities were devoted mainly to farms, grazing, recreation, and natural vegetation. The conceptualization is Howardian in its integration of "closely related urban and rural life" into a regional pattern, the cellular-hierarchical internal structure of the communities, and the prospect of dinosaur cities undergoing a "metropolitan reconstruction" along greenbelt-and-satellite lines. But it is also thoroughly modernist, opting for a linear, car-dependent morphology and fail-

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Figure 18. The regional city: compact communities forming "a regional pattern of closely related urban and rural life." From Clarence Stein, "City Patterns . . . Past and Future," New Pencil Points 23 (June 1942): 53.

ing to stress any real ecological dimension in growth management. This is one of Stein's ironically tided "Green Cities," in which large areas are simply left open to provide "the surest method of preparing for flexible growth."44 Nevertheless, the regional city has been made to work effectively, and the outstanding application is Canberra, the Australian national capital. In the early 1960s the city's planners had to confront a metropolitan future beyond the confines of the original Walter Burley Griffin plan (1912). Committed to avoiding traditional sprawl, and evolving their ideas beyond a town cluster model, the planners' solution was the so-called Y-Plan, unveiled in Tomorrows Canberra (1970). This envisaged axes of self-contained urban districts linked by parkways through open country, with ridgelines and hilltops preserved free of urban development. This structure had evolved partly spontaneously, pardy via American land use-transportation planning methodology, and indirecdy through exposure to the regional city ideas of Stein. An important conduit for the latter was Canberra adviser Gordon Stephenson, a key figure in British town and country planning in the 1940s who as editor of Town Planning Review had commissioned

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the articles that eventually led to Stein's Toward New Towns for America (1957). While Canberra has evolved into a low density city of car commuters, its extraordinary endowment of peripheral and interstitial open space demonstrates well the sort of ways Stein strove to bring "peaceful life in spacious green surroundings to ordinary people." Moreover, the generous space standards and ordered physical framework create a greater adaptability to retrofitting sustainable planning initiatives.45

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Greenways

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Although Benton MacKaye's concept of the "open way" could be conceived as a regional response to guiding development, the origins of the modern greenway movement lie more in practical, localized, community-based responses to urban environmental problems pardy stimulated by the ecological turn in landscape architecture from the 1960s. The Capital Area Greenway in Raleigh, North Carolina—brainchild of Bill Flournoy in the early 1970s—was an important step forward, while Ian McHarg's Design with Nature (1969) provided a theoretical underpinning to modern greenway thinking. Greenbelts in the form of linear greenways preserve natural and rehabilitated lands and ecosystems. The ecological rationale tends to be paramount, scenic quality is conserved, informal recreational opportunities are prioritized, and regional growth containment is usually incidental. The forms and functions of greenways vary gready, although most integrate both cultural and natural values. Charles E. Litde recognizes five main types: urban riverside, recreational, ecologically significant, scenic and historic, and comprehensive natural systems. Such greenbelts can be conceived with little or no reference to the historical lineage of the term, although some greenways and green strips may be allied to mainstream regional planning initiatives. Greenways recall parkbelts and greenwebs when defined as riparian, wedand, and greensward corridors. But they can refer to larger tracts of land; relatively small-scale improvements like paved trails for walking, jogging, and biking; or unpaved trails for hiking or horseback riding.46 Search the key term greenbelt on the Internet, and these populist connotations are actually the most common meanings, frequendy associated more with nonprofit, voluntary groups than with public agencies, although complementary joint ventures are now common. The greenway movement has burgeoned since the 1980s; a mid-1990s estimate suggested upwards of five hundred in the United States (fig. 19). Three examples illustrate the diversity. The Greenbelt

I I Bay Circuit Corridor r——I Trails & Other Routes B M Open Spaces I—->l Rivers Figure 1 p. From parkbelts to greenway to green girdle: conceptual plan of the "Bay Circuit" greenway system, Boston, Massachusetts. From Charles E. Little, Greenways for America (Baltimore, 1995), p. 162. Courtesy of Charles E. Little.

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Coalition of Mid-Missouri works to preserve stream corridors to help "minimize storm water runoff damage, preserve ecosystems and create a network for wildlife." The Boise River Greenbelt in Idaho links 850 acres of parks and natural areas and includes 14 miles of bicycle and pedestrian paths. The Capital Area Greenbelt Association works to protect a 20-mile corridor of parks and open spaces connecting "virtually every point of environmental, recreational, or historic significance" in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A notable international example is Frankfurt City Council's Greenbelt in the Rhein-Main metropolitan area in Germany. Consolidated since 1990, this consists of 80 square kilometers of meadows, orchards, city forest, farmland, and other open spaces exploiting an outer fortification ring and extending Ernst May's green strips of the 1920s.47 Ecology has also breathed new meaning into longer-established greenbelts. Jacques Greber's crescent-shaped 20,000-hectare "emerald necklace" around Ottawa was a central feature of his 1950 National Capital Area plan. It was intended to confine development to zones that could be easily serviced, prevent sprawl and ribbon development, enhance recreational opportunities, and encourage the protection of natural features. By the early 1980s, the utilization of this complex resource was being rethought. Land use conflicts were more frequent; recreational pressures were increasing; and, with one-quarter of the area comprising wedand, marshland, forests, and peat bogs, a "contemporary understanding of ecosystems had to be injected." Following extensive studies and consultation, a more sophisticated land zoning and management scheme emerged, and the greenbelt boundary was adjusted. The sale of excised land has funded the ecological rehabilitation of more sensitive environments of woodlots, hedgerows, and vegetation buffers. Even Letchworth's rural estate is now viewed through green-colored glasses. With an annual capital budget of £100,000, the Garden City Heritage Foundation is implementing a management plan to enhance wildlife habitats, encourage diversity of flora and fauna, and improve public access. This program will be completed by 2003 to mark the centenary of the Garden City.48

Green Zones A contemporary form of greenbelt updates Howard's agricultural belt idea to embrace a concatenation of open spaces—wedands, parklands, countryside, golf courses, watersheds, retention basins, wildlife habitats, national parks, and conservation areas—reserved in perpetuity and defining an ultimate outer limit to

Greenbelts in City and Regional Planning horizontal urban growth. These "green edges" or "green zones" relate to the concept of urban growth boundaries, a peculiarly North American terminology. With the implementation of urban growth boundaries, promoters claim that all cities can have greenbelts.49 The urban growth boundary (UGB) is an officially designated line dividing land to be developed for urban purposes over a long period—hopefully to more compact, contiguous, and community-defining standards than in the past— from land to be protected for natural or rural uses. As a growth management tool, the UGB is intended to provide greater certainty for both development and conservation, but the concept surely raises many of the same questions associated with British-style greenbelts. Any declaration requires the understanding and cooperation of contiguous authorities. The drawing of boundaries is critical: if they are overly generous, the UGB's development-consolidating objectives will be diluted; if they are too arbitrary, its environmental rationale is questioned. Is the UGB robust enough to survive future legal challenges? Is it to be permanent or movable? Too limited on their own, UGBs need to be embedded within a more sophisticated blend of regulations and incentives, top-down and bottom-up planning. Farmland preservation—a return to the Howardian ideal—looms large within that mix.50 The first and most famous state-mandated UGB was that of Pordand, Oregon. Since the 1970s it has reportedly protected large areas of forest and farmland at the region's edges, increased the quantity and density of urban housing, and helped revitalize downtown. The achievements reflect the interplay of a state planning system rooted in farm preservation; a strategic alliance of environmental, rural and planning interests; and informed community debate. Civic leadership is a crucial gel. Other jurisdictions with fixed long-term boundaries in the United States include Boulder, Colorado, and communities in a number of peri-urban counties in California such as Sonoma, north of San Francisco. Elsewhere, similar goals are being pursued by citizen-driven advocacy and eduT cation. For example, formed in the late 1950s, the mission of the Greenbelt Alliance in the San Francisco Bay Area is to fight new suburban development in defense of a de facto 3.8 million-acre greenbelt of farmland, watersheds, redwoods, and parks.51 Vancouver, British Columbia—one of the fastest growing regions in Canada —is a positive story. Here province-sanctioned regional growth management is linked explicidy to a Green Zone (fig. 20). The Green Zone is intended to protect Greater Vancouver's major natural assets, including regional parks, water-

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sheds, conservation areas, ecologically important areas, farmland, and most particularly the lowlands of the Fraser River valley, by delineating a long-term boundary for urban growth. The policy does not stand alone but is integrated with other regional planning objectives. Implementation will depend not only on finely tuned planning instruments but also on complex agreements between municipal, provincial, and federal governments and other stakeholders.52

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The reality of late-twentieth-century mega-urbanization—dynamic, unrelenting, interterritorial, and globally driven—increasingly defies simple spatial formulas of desirable metropolitan and regional structures. Pressures to deregulate and privatize in many jurisdictions further sap the ability of planning systems to respond vigorously to new challenges. Historical and contemporary solutions for a variety of circumstances—often quite specialized—have been canvassed here, but what of the relevance of such concepts to even more explosive forms of contemporary urbanization? The challenges are formidable. Drawing on northern European trends, K. R. Kunzmann has demonstrated how the land use mix of city regions is becoming increasingly fragmented and specialized with "new spatial categories" emerging: edge cities, out-of-town shopping complexes, major distribution centers, theme park zones, and airport-aerospace complexes. In this model, rural areas nearest the city become gentrified rural-residential zones "at the hands of urbanites." It is a complex, variegated space-economy, and the interregional competition for growth, information networks, and functional flows of goods, services, and people that underlies it reinforces the shorthand description of the "patchwork city." Robert Fishman describes a similar urban landscape in the "vast low-density regions" that have displaced the traditional city in North America.53 Within these dynamic regions, the town-country shibboleth of the garden city tradition in its purest sense seems increasingly antiquated, and the concept of economic and physical self-containment meaningless. How then might essential aspirations of the garden city—physical growth circumscribed and articulated by green zones—be achievable? Fishman talks of "a new design synthesis," which redefines the town-country magnet as a "continuous juxtaposition and interpenetration on a regional scale of urban and rural elements." Planners might assemble such landscapes from the "fragments of design created within individual developers' projects." More proactive strategies for making green

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cities out of collage cities are propounded in two interesting scenarios, one American, the other British.54 Peter Calthorpe's Next American Metropolis (1993) looks for alternatives to sprawl in mixed-use, above-average-density, pedestrian scaled "transit-oriented developments" (TODs) planned as neighborhoods. When a city region's growth cannot be reasonably contained within urban growth boundaries, TODs are reconstituted into "greenbelted new towns." Many overlapping types of open space and natural systems must shape the urban region: parks, waterways and flood plains, ridgelands and bays, prime agriculture lands, and special ecological habitats. These basically comprise a threefold hierarchy giving form and shape to the region: greenbelts that form a natural and ultimate edge to the urban field, open spaces that form a large-scale connecting greenweb within the region, and spaces that provide neighborhood identity and recreation.55

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Calthorpe provides examples of regional growth management strategies in this mold in Pordand and Sacramento (fig. 21). However, like his compatriots in the New Urbanism movement, at heart he seems most comfortable with walking rather than commuting distance, urban rather than regional design, and the village green rather than the greenbelt. The dynamics of metropolitan growth are simplified and almost made amenable to his prescription. And there is the same sense of a "new" environmental determinism predicated on the assumption that design dictates behavior. But what makes Calthorpe's vision so interesting is the holistic integration of diverse greenbelt city notions into a meaningful contemporary package and an awareness, at least, of the regional dimension. Concepts of environmental sustainability more direcdy inform the holistic approach identified with the British Town and Country Planning Association, the successor body to Howard's original Garden City Association. Michael Breheny and Ralph Rookwood have constructed an ideal spatial form to match a multifaceted appreciation of sustainability (fig. 22). They argue that overarching objectives relating to natural resource conservation, especially land use and transport planning, energy usage, and pollution minimization, must guide future development if an acceptable rate and scale of progress are to be achieved. Reducing pollution and waste, securing greater energy efficiencies, devising more environmentally friendly transport systems, and minimizing the separation of homes from jobs and services are relevant to all parts of the urban region. Other policy objectives and planning measures are attuned to the varying environmental conditions of different parts of the region (i.e., suburbs, city centers, mixed urban-agricultural areas, remote rural areas). On the broadest scale, the

Figure 21. Containing urban development and preserving green and agricultural landscapes: theoretical demonstration of an urban growth boundary. From Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community and the American Dream (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), p. 70.

sustainable city region steers between total containment and complete dispersal to promote hard edges to big-city development, the nucleation of outer development, and the comprehensive preservation of agricultural and natural environments. 56 This rather fluid view of a town and country matrix breaks away from the straightjacket of the small greenbelt-encircled city and the simplicity of the satellite town model. It is arguably a bit too tidy, dealing more confidendy with the neat differentiation of physical space as opposed to the messiness of functional integration. But the Breheny and Rookwood model does begin to address the

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Robert Freestone Protect natural ecosystems, biodiversity, a More compact mxi ed-use new settlements to Wildli,e ^ 3 take urban growth ^ ^ J, . More attractive public transport (PT) more frequent & reliable* More economci public transport with more balanced loadings More dedicated PT routes; light rail or bus-only • • • Road pricing & parking charges to restrain private car use Restrictions on new car-based development, . More attractive cycling & walking routes & pedestrian areas

More tree planting on watersheds, field boundaries, urban areas ' Communtiy forests to Increase biomass^ Increased densities in suburbs & small towns, at PT nodes

Reduce commutn i g by better balance of homes & jobs More mixed deveo l pment & home working Increased production & use of renewabe l energy, solar gain, Upgrade energy efficiency of existing buildings" Enforce regional ceilings for emission of pollutants Reduce pollution & waste by closed-cycle processes, recycling

Reduce urban spread by greening & decongesting inner cities

Figure 22. The Social City revisited: balancing the forces of decentralization and the drive for containment within a sustainable "inter-dependent regional complex" supported by a raft of environmentally sensitive policies. From Michael Breheny and Ralph Rookwood, "Planning the Sustainable City Region," in Andrew Blowers, ed., Planning for a Sustainable Environment (London: Kogan Page, 1993], p. 161. view that greenbelts of various forms should be part of more comprehensive land use-transportation policy. Their diagrammatic labels are less prescriptive strategies than environmental homilies, a little like Howard's use of the biblical injunction to "go up and possess the land" on his earliest garden city diagrams. But the Howard connection is most obvious in the term used to describe this normative landscape: "the social city region." This creative interpretation thus brings us back close to where we began.

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Conclusion This survey of the history of greenbelt city ideas has focused on the ways they have influenced physical planning. Much detail has been omitted, particularly issues of policy and politics, administration and implementation, and stories of human and personal impacts of green planning controls. The focus has been on identifying major trends in how planning theorists and practitioners have inter-

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preted and developed the concept of the greenbelt. Like New Town, amenity, public interest, sustainability, and other planning touchstones, greenbelt is an elastic term: it has been given quite diverse and sometimes contradictory meanings across time and space in response to perceived needs and challenges. There is still the sense of an evolving, adaptable, and functional concept; a sensible shift toward integration of its multiple connotations; the importance of planning for specific places rather than imposing generic solutions; and the noteworthy historical shift toward a genuine ecological rationale for greenbelts. In The Last Landscape, Willliam H. Whyte cast the history of British greenbelt thought as a series of swings between containment and use. Here, that history has been surveyed in a broader historical sweep. What emerges is a convergence if not an extension of both functions. The greenbelt as a purely agricultural belt seems less relevant, and the greening of the concept seems irreversible, with planning policy probably lagging behind the popular imagination as to the possibilities of greenbelts in terms of intrinsic ecological and ecosystem value. This awareness parallels the rise of the environmental movement. Increasingly, greenbelts make sense as just one type of protected zone responding to numerous land and cultural terrains in a diverse mosaic including national parks, nature reserves, high-grade agricultural land, conservation areas, scenic easements, and other strategies. In this sense the greenbelt merges with other traditions of nature conservation and urban biodiversity protection. Within metropolitan areas a mix of greenwebs, greenways, and green-whatevers, necessarily matched by appropriate planning instruments, can respond to varied needs and opportunities. This sort of postmodern diversity seems desirable because it means greenbelts can serve many human purposes, can have utility beyond grand schemata that are ends in themselves, and can serve as instruments for environmental justice. The major challenge confronting this inclusive notion is the reconciliation of inevitably conflicting values (e.g., access vs. conservation) in variegated green zones. Ebenezer Howard's treatise was clearly a product of its time. The garden city can now be read as an idealistic, simplistic, even quaint invention of early modernism: a symmetrical combination of two monolithic artifacts—town and country—harnessing the best technology of the day, created by consensus, a scientific experiment no less. Howard's famous diagrams have become spatial fiction, as metropolitan ecological footprints extend far beyond any neat notions of a discrete rural hinterland. Even the green credentials of the garden city are muted. Howard's idea of nature ran to singing birds and babbling brooks, but he

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was no George Perkins Marsh. In brutal terms, garden cities are culturally and historically specific concepts. Genuine green cities—and we can see this in any number of eco-city proposals—demand multifaceted processes of environmental management (e.g., low energy usage, waste water treatment, pollution controls, recycling, nature conservation, endangered species legislation, public transport ridership, etc.). Yet we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Beyond the late Victorian milieu in which it was conceived and the heritage landscapes created, at the core of the garden city tradition is an enduring relevance. As Dennis Hardy maintains, "the garden city movement's traditional concerns to promote rural protection, to create compact and efficient smaller urban forms within defined boundaries as an alternative to suburban sprawl, to minimize commuting and even to promote gardening remain impressively 'green' goals."57 In surveying the history of the greenbelt idea, and in looking ahead, we can still learn several things from Howard and several generations of planners, environmentalists, and visionary thinkers who inherited his humility and commitment: — We cannot rely solely on the state to take the initiative in matters of social and environmental progress; community action and vigilance are necessary. — We can devise any number of eminendy sensible and environmentally responsible ideas, but they will remain theoretical without the establishment and maturation of a practical civic infrastructure to pursue policies. — We are reminded that growth management has to be regional; the parts need to be related to the whole. — We are inspired by Howard's mission to secure the dividends of higher environmental quality for everyone regardless of location, race, or class; his was an enduring argument for regional form to embody the ideals of social justice. In some cases it still makes sense to follow "the true path of reform" by building "working models," as Howard himself wrote, "thinking only of the larger tasks which lie beyond as incentives to a determined line of immediate action." Howard's big picture was no less than the construction of a "better and brighter civilization," but he ultimately reminded us in the caveats to his own diagrams that actual solutions must respond to the circumstance of place.58

J

CHAPTER

T h e

FIVE

O r i g i n s

R e s i d e n t i a l

o f t h e

G a r d e n

C i t y

N e i g h b o r h o o d

Mervyn Miller

Conventional wisdom states that the formulation of the neighborhood concept of urban planning was an American development, to which Clarence Perry, Henry Wright, and Clarence Stein made significant contributions during the 1920s. The neighborhood unit quickly became a logical building block for a series of community plans and was readily exported to England, where, after it had made an initial appearance in the wartime plans of Patrick Abercrombie, it became the basis for many of the master plans of the postwar New Towns. Conventional wisdom is correct, as it so often is, but only up to a point. Apart from representing a natural, innate community element, palpably evident in numberless historical agro-subsistence setdements, the modern emergence of the concept derived from the nineteenth-century societal critiques of John Ruskin (1819-1900) and William Morris (1834-1896). In planning historiography it figured in prototype form in the theoretical work of Ebenezer Howard (18501928) and was integral to his garden city model. The neighborhood also made an appearance in prototype form in the writings and early plans of Barry Parker (1867-1947) a n d Raymond Unwin (1863-1940), from the late 1890s, and was developed through their plans for Letchworth Garden City and Hampstead

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The Origins of the Garden City Neighborhood ror

Garden Suburb. Responsive to a transadantic interchange of ideas, Parker and Unwin assisted the development, both of the neighborhood plan and its natural complement, the subdivision of the urban mass by major distributor roads, with the elimination of through traffic within, featuring culs-de-sac and independent pedestrian circulation, which came to fruition in mature form in Clarence Stein and Henry Wright's layout for Radburn, New Jersey, in 1928-29. Although the work of Parker and Unwin is crucial to the evolution of neighborhood planning, it is important to recognize that their contemporary Thomas Adams (18711940) also made a far-reaching contribution to the emergence of American planning; it was, of course, Adams who promoted the publication of Perry's concept in 1929, in the Regional Survey ofNew York and Its Environs.1

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This chapter explores the origins of the concept, which paved the way for the transadantic handover in the 1920s. It was Walter Creese in his seminal reappraisal of the garden city, The Search for Environment (1966), who conceptualized "the village as an animate symbol" in the theoretical and practical work of Parker and Unwin.2 The village had for a long time represented the logical community grouping, particularly in agrarian societies, in which it represented both a natural community unit and an essential element of the rural economy; it formed both the physical and the theoretical basis for the evolution of planning the neighborhood unit. The fracturing of the agrarian sense of communal interdependence by the industrial revolution served as catalyst for the critiques of Ruskin and Morris and also for the quasi-utopian experiments of the Chartists, formed in the 1840s following the teachings of the charismatic Irishman Feargus O'Connor (1794-1857), beginning with Heronsgate, near Watford, Hertfordshire, founded in 1846. Religious sects such as the Moravians, who had built in the mid-eighteenth century, also provided examples of self-contained planned community development. Such villages would typically incorporate at least local services, and in the Moravian settlements, such as Fulneck, West Yorkshire, founded 1742, there was a distinctive focus on religious and educational buildings. The coherent and self-contained nature of such communities was perceived as an ideal that might be fostered afresh in the Utopian and practical developments that burgeoned in the later nineteenth century.3 The village as an aesthetic ideal stems from the romantic movement and the Picturesque revival that produced John Nash's Blaise Hamlet (fig. 23), near Bristol (1812); Somerleyton, Suffolk (1851); or Holly Lodge, Highgate, London (1865).4 The Picturesque revival was an adjunct of romanticism, but such images as the idealized village green, which formed the nucleus for Blaise Hamlet, built for the elderly

Figure 23. Blaise Hamlet, Bristol, 18 r r, John Nash, architect. The epitome of Picturesque design and an important, seminal influence on garden city housing layout. Mervyn Miller.

retainers of J. S. Harford's Blaise Castle estate, proved an enduring feature of community planning into the twentieth century. John Ruskin brought a moral dimension to art and its relationship with the society that created it. He bestrode the midcentury like an intellectual colossus. Building upon the earlier enthusiasm of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852), he fostered acceptance of Gothic architecture and through his discourse "The Nature of Gothic" delineated the relationship between craftsman and product, which became one of the key texts of emergent socialism.5 Ruskin's prolific output included studies in political economy, which incorporated passages that gave vivid insight into the subsequent aims of town planning. Howard, and later Mumford, selected the following quotation for its figurative power in evoking a broad environmental goal: in it we can glimpse the garden city, with its verdant lawns and orchards, defining boundary, and surrounding greenbelt. And providing lodgement for them [working people] means a great deal of vigorous legislature and cutting down of vested interests . . .; thorough sanitary and remedial action in the houses that we have; and then the building of more, strongly,

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beautifully, and in groups of limited extent,... and walled round, so that there may be no festering and wretched suburb anywhere, but clean and busy streets within, and the open country without, with a belt of beautiful garden and orchard around the walls, so that from any part of the city perfectly fresh air and grass and the sight of far horizon may be reachable in a few minutes' walk. This is thefinalaim.6 Ruskin also promoted his own Utopian experiments. The Guild of St. George was founded in 1871, and in 1876 it approved the purchase of land at Todey, on the outskirts of the Yorkshire city of Sheffield, which became St. George's Farm. As an experiment that combined shoemaking and market gardening, St. George's Farm was not a success, and in the mid 1880s it was sublet to a friend of Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), the socialist philosopher who had founded his own communal experiment at Millthorpe, a few miles away, in the Cordwell valley. One of Carpenter's most enthusiastic young supporters was Raymond Unwin, who had returned north after an Oxford adolescence, during which he had heard both Ruskin and Morris lecturing on art and society.7 Unwin was to become a key link between the utopianists and the pragmatists in community planning. The writings of William Morris were interspersed with his rose-tinted hindsight view of the communitarian nature of medieval society, particularly after his socialist credo emerged in the 1880s, and in 1891 NewsfromNowhere presented a potent message of how old forms might be revived to serve new needs.8 In "Art and Socialism," a lecture given in Leicester in January 1884, the year in which he founded the Socialist League, Morris hinted at the synthesis of social and environmental factors with which planning would be increasingly concerned over the next century. He specified the fundamental requirements of the fuller life as "honourable and fitting work," "decency of surroundings," and "leisure," objectives that still form the basis of comprehensive plans. "Decency of surroundings" was further subdivided to include "1. Good lodging; 2. Ample space; 3. General Order and beauty. That is: 1. Our houses must be well built, clean and healthy. 2. There must be abundant garden space in our towns, and our towns must not eat up the fields and natural features of the country. 3. Order and beauty means that not only our houses must be stoudy and properly built, but also that they be ornamented duly: that the fields be not only left for cultivation, but also that they be not spoilt by it any more than a garden is spoilt: no one for instance be allowed to cut down, for mere profit, trees whose loss would spoil a landscape."9 Raymond Unwin was an enthusiastic acolyte of Morris from the early 1880s, and

The Origins of the Garden City Neighborhood ro3 from 1885-87 he served as secretary of the Manchester Branch of the Socialist League. During this period he contributed long articles to Morris's Commonweal, analyzing, at second hand, preindustrial communities, which he commended for their social cohesion. Influenced by his experience of Edward Carpenter's small commune at Millthorpe, in 1889 Unwin wrote about commandeering Sutton Hall, the country seat of the Arkwrights, to found his own community: "Small wonder t h a t . . . we should fall to talking about 'the days that are going to be' when this hall and others like it will be the centre of a happy communal life. Plenty of room . . . for quite a small colony to live, each one having his own den upstairs where he could go to write or sulk, or spend a quiet evening with his lady-love or boon companion; and downstairs would be common dining halls, smoking rooms—if indeed life still needed the weed to make it perfect."10 It was only to be expected that Unwin would seek to reinterpret such concepts in the context of his community plans. At this period he had become a qualified engineer and draftsman in the offices of the Staveley Coal and Iron Company, a few miles from Chesterfield, Derbyshire. His duties included laying out new colliery villages with the opening of new pits. These were basic, with serried ranks of terraced housing built by local contractors. The distance between ideology and practice was extreme. However, Unwin produced a creditable standard design for a community school, and in 1894, at Barrow Hill, headquarters of the Staveley Company, he collaborated with Barry Parker, by now his brotherin-law, over the design of St. Andrew's Church. 11 Parker had responded more readily to the artistic dimension of Morris's work and in r 891 had proposed a professional partnership, with "he [Parker] doing the artistic part, and me [Unwin] the practical."12 The partnership came into being in 1896. During the 1890s, the work was largely concerned with individual middle-class houses in a richly eclectic northern variant of the Arts and Crafts style, which permeated their work on prototypes of community design and paved the way for what Sir Frederic J. Osborn (1885-1978), one of Howard's most committed and influential followers, regarded as "democratisation of design."13 Ebenezer Howard, approaching the concept of an ideal community and its components from a rather different direction, cared litde about the artistic and social implications of the Arts and Crafts movement. His concept of the garden city was formulated and drafted initially in response to the English publication, in 1889, of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (which had also stimulated Morris to write News from Nowhere). After laborious writing and rewriting, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform eventually appeared in October 1898.14

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Howard's "object-lesson" incorporated a proto-neighborhood concept in the diagrammatic garden city, based on the political unit of the ward, the administrative subdivisions of urban centers, and the secular equivalent of the parish. Looking at his diagram of the Ward and Centre (see fig. 6, above), the subdivision of the Garden City by major radial boulevards immediately suggests the existence of a superblock within each, defined by the radial boulevards: "[E]ach ward . . . should be in some sense a complete town by itself, and thus the school buildings might serve, in the earlier stages, not only as schools, but as places for religious worship, for concerts, for libraries, and for meetings of various kinds."15

1

C. B. Purdom (r 883 -1965), who had worked alongside Howard in the Letchworth estate office, was one observer who, admittedly with the benefit of hindsight, saw the neighborhood unit as an "integral part" of Howard's conception of the garden city: "[E]ach of the wards in his original scheme," Purdom wrote, "was a unit of 5000 people, with its own community buildings."16 Howard was aware of the innovative model industrial villages of the latter part of the nineteenth century, notably George Cadbury's Bournville (1895) (fig. 24) and William Hesketh Lever's Port Sunlight (1888).17 These revived the Picturesque

The Origins of the Garden City Neighborhood 105 tradition in their Arts and Crafts architecture and also incorporated their own social and educational facilities, again suggesting self-contained neighborhoods. At the turn of the century, both Bournville, in 1901, and Port Sunlight, in 1902, were the venues for successive Garden City Association conferences, just at the time when the concept was being translated from mechanistic diagram to material form. Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin played the key role in the evolution of the built form of the garden city.18 During the 1890s Unwin had written enthusiastically about cooperation as the basis for somewhat idealized urban and rural communities—the former featuring a quadrangle concept, and the latter a village green. The concepts were published, with illustrations by Parker, in The Art of Building a Home in 1901 (fig. 25).19 The village green model appears to have been based upon an embryonic scheme prepared for a site at Adel Grange, north of Leeds. The client, Isabella Ford, was a friend and follower of Edward Carpenter. The concept led directly to New Earswick and Letchworth, and even in its first appearance there was a sense of a self-contained community unit, either freestanding or as building blocks for larger schemes. As Unwin explained: "The village was the expression of a small corporate life in which all the different units were personally in touch with each other, conscious of and frankly accepting their relations . . . it is this crystallisation of the elements in a village in accordance with a definitely organised life of mutual relations . . . which gives the appearance of being an organic whole, the home of a community. . . . The sense of unity is further increased by general harmony. . . due to the prevalent use of certain materials, which are usually those found in the district."20 Unwin was, of course, writing at a time when use of land by the freeholder was unrestricted: it is perhaps ironic that the subsequent successful demonstration of the benefits of physical planning at Letchworth and Hampstead Garden Suburb eventually brought about restrictions on the sporadic development of rural land as advocated in this early essay. Nevertheless, this led toward the planned neighborhood. Unwin thus refers to complete villages developed on predetermined plans:

Figure 24. Bournville Village green and shops, 1905-8, H. Bedford Tylor, architect. The continuing influence of the Picturesque and the revival of old English vernacular architecture is evident. Mervyn Miller.

[N]o building should be commenced until some definite conception of what the completed village was to be like had been worked out. The sites for prospective schools, churches, or other public buildings should be reserved from the first, in accordance with the size to which the land would allow the community to grow.... The improvement and use of the land not required for building purposes, by drain-

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The Origins of the Garden City Neighborhood 107 crowding in towns by developing hamlets and villages in the oudying districts wherever they had, or could get, suitable land."22 The quadrangle scheme was shown for the urban context, with a design for an unidentified Yorkshire town (fig. 26).23 This model was developed further in Unwin's Fabian tract Cottage Plans and Common Sense, published in 1902 (fig. 27).24 Based on boyhood memories of collegiate Oxford, the scheme also provided a prototype for the urban

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Figure 25. Plan of village green, c. r899, by Raymond Unwin, as published in The Art of Building a Home (1901). This informal, open-ended grouping became an element of identity within larger schemes and was most completely realized at Westholm, Letchworth, in 1906. Author's collection. ing, planting of fruit trees, or erection of a suitable dairy, would be one of the first and most important of these . . . , and at the same time allow the open ground to be enjoyed to the full for recreative purposes.21

1 vhWIlOA 3?9n6.. j BUJCK PUW .Of «jnOP,flNOE Or UR \ C£R . HOUSS t BN0 COMMON ROOMS. Figure 26. Quadrangles of cooperative dwellings for a Yorkshire town, c. r898, designed by Raymond Unwin, as illustrated in The Art of Building a Home (i9or). The concept looked back to the collegiate model andforwardto the rationalized block layout of Nothing Gained by Overcrowding (19T2). Author's collection.

The imagery of Ruskin's or Morris's idealized workers' housing is close, yet this was to be no secluded Utopia but a practical model for cooperative development. "On the same lines, also, the state or municipal landlord might relieve the over-

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The Origins of the Garden City Neighborhood 109 formation. There was an extravagant ratio of houses to street length, a fault that Unwin corrected as he began to formulate Nothing Gainedby Overcrowdingbzsed on his practical achievements at New Earswick, Letchworth, and Hampstead Garden Suburb.

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Figure 27. The Fabian tract Cottage Plans and Common Sense (1902) brought Unwin's work to a national audience of housing reformers. This illustration by his assistant, B. Wilson Bidwell, showed the maturing of the quadrangle scheme. Author's collection.

neighborhood block of the future via its expansion and later development in Nothing Gainedby Overcrowding ^912). Quadrangles eventually made their appearance at Letchworth, in "Homesgarth," promoted by Ebenezer Howard and designed by H. Clapham Lander in 1910. At Hampstead Garden Suburb the model was used, notably, in Parker and Unwin's elderly persons' flats, "The Orchard" (1909), and M. H. Baillie Scott's flats for business ladies, "Waterlow Court" ^909). A final theoretical prototype was represented by a model and drawings, subsequendy published in Cottages near a Town,25 that were exhibited at the Northern Artworkers Guild in Manchester in 1903 but based on a small housing scheme designed for a site at Starbeck, Yorkshire, a few miles east of the spa town of Harrogate. This was of neighborhood scale, with a grid of streets conforming to the local bylaws. The conventional terraces were broken up into semidetached pairs of cottages, stepped alternately back and forward along the street frontage in checkerboard

Hard on the theoretical work came the commission for the model village of New Earswick, Joseph Rowntree's factory village a few miles north of York.26 Seebohm Rowntree met Unwin at the Garden City Association Conference in Bournville in 1901, and development began a year later. In the New Earswick plan, Unwin was able to incorporate a wide range of community buildings, including a small hall and a primary school (fig. 28). These became the social and educational nuclei for the village as it developed from 1902 until the outbreak of the First World War. The idea of containment on a village scale proved readily transferable to the much larger Garden City at Letchworth, for which Unwin evolved the initial master layout plan in the winter of 1903. The plan was approved early in 1904; it was officially issued a few weeks later and was widely published (fig. 29).27 Although details evolved and the oudying areas differed significantly from this initial concept, many of the main principles guided the development of Letchworth for many years, and the formal framework for the town center, together with the outlying residential areas, was a striking feature of the plan as it materialized in built form up to r 914. Unwin used wedges of green space to articulate the elements of the plan, notably the narrow parkway following the line of the Pix Brook, which separates the town center from the working-class residential areas to the east, so situated for their ready proximity to the industrial area, which bordered the Great Northern Railway. In both the Glebe land to the north of the railway and the Pixmore area to the south, the neighborhood concept is readily discernible. Purdom found the influence of the neighborhood concept "marked upon the Letchworth plan."28 Both areas had a degree of self-containment, and their perimeters were well defined. Sites for schools and other community buildings were located within each area. In terms of implementation, the housing followed and elaborated Unwin's prototypes from New Earswick with informal groups using picturesque features such as gables, and it was sited to promote the concept of neighborliness. Perhaps the most striking examples are the village greens to be found at Westholm on Wilbury Road (fig. 30) and off Ridge Road close to Pixmore. Together with the cul-de-sac, these greens formed elements that could be combined within a larger whole, which worked toward the superblock in size. At Letchworth the scale of development was influenced by financial considera-


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plete before 1914, and the contribution of the Letchworth Cottages and Buildings Society and the Howard Cottage Society consolidated a well-defined neighborhood, with the Norton Road School as the first new school to be opened in the Garden City. The same concept of an established neighborhood, largely for working-class housing, was to be found at Hampstead Garden Suburb, which Unwin planned from February 1905 onward for Henrietta Barnett, who campaigned initially to add a northern extension to the well-established Hampstead Heath and then to construct a garden suburb around it.32 Unwin's plan for the "Artisans' Quarter" stemmed from Mrs. Barnett's requirement that a place in the suburb should be

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tions, particularly the ability of the various low-dividend cottage building societies to fund development. There was inevitably a piecemeal phasing of construction, but during 1906-9 the Garden City Tenants funded the development of the Pixmore Estate, which almost comprises a small superblock in itself, 16.35 acres (5.35 hectares), with 164 houses, at a density of 12 to the acre (fig. 31). It was defined by perimeter roads and had a small zigzag road through the center to serve the inner housing. Moreover, the block featured a school and an institute and local recreational grounds.29 Pixmore, together with the nearby Birds Hill-Ridge Road housing, was published in Unwin's seminal textbook Town Planning in Practice in 1909.30 Unwin generalized from his experience at Pixmore and elsewhere by writing: "In any but very small sites there are likely to be required some buildings of a larger or more public character . . . churches, chapels, public halls, institutes, libraries, baths, wash-houses, shops, inns or hotels, elementary and other schools; and it would probably be well . . . to group them in some convenient situation . . . to form a centre for the scheme."31 The Glebe housing is not so well known, but this development was also largely com-

Figure 31. Garden City Tenants' housing scheme, Pixmore, 1907-9. This plan, illustrated in Town Planning in Practice (1909), indicates Unwin's growing confidence in techniques of site layout and increase in scale toward the self-contained neighborhood unit. Author's collection.

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found for all, and she had endorsed the layout with her handwritten comments that "[t]his is the 70 acres alloted [sic] for the houses of the industrial classes at 10 to an acre" (fig. 32).33 The scheme was probably Unwin's masterpiece of site layout and housing design, and it benefited from the collaboration of a number of his best assistants, among them Charles Paget Wade, Samuel Pointon Taylor, and Frank Bromhead. This, like its Letchworth predecessor, was developed by cottage building societies, branches of the Co-Partnership Tenants, which had been initiated by the Liberal member of Parliament Henry Vivian shordy after the turn of the century. The suburb was officially inaugurated on May 2, 1907, with Mrs. Barnett herself turning the sod for the first pair of cottages to be built in Hampstead Way. In layout and design, this constituted a neighborhood (fig. 33). Groupings, particularly in Asmuns Place, were arranged to encourage neighborliness. At its head, this cul-de-sac featured a bowling green and two small children's play areas, complete with playhouses. In the backland there were allotments, while along the frontages of the roads, the building lines were used to create subgroupings and avoid the visual monotony of the corridor street, which was anathema to Unwin. A primary school lay on the northern fringe of the area and also served a second phase of Hampstead Tenants housing construction further north to Addison Way. The Club House lay at a strategic position where the Artisans' Quarter met middle-class development: it was intended to foster the breaking down of class barriers. Circulation through the area was assisted by footpaths independent of the street network, a particular feature of the second phase of development along Addison Way and Hogarth Hill, including the culsde-sac of Coleridge Walk and Wordsworth Walk, completed shortly before the First World War. The middle-class areas, too, contained the seeds of Wright and Stein's work at Radburn, for example, the series of secluded closes between Meadway and the Heath Extension, particularly Linnell Close (fig. 34), Reynolds Close (fig. 35), and Heath Close, off Hampstead Way. The latter two closes, Reynolds and Heath, only needed to be flip-flopped over to the Heath Extension side to create the concept that underlay the basis of Radburn planning (fig. 36). Writing in 1932, Thomas Adams, who had overseen preparation of the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs and was thus familiar with Perry's detailed work, concluded that "in England, the nearest approach to a neighbourhood unit that complies with these [New York] principles is the Hampstead Garden Suburb."34 Unwin's theoretical work also moves toward a more formal neighborhood

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concept. In 1912 the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association issued Nothing Gained by Overcrowding, which sought to contrast the benefits of the garden city with the monotony of unregulated bylaw developments, characteristic of the outward spread of London and the industrial cities of the Midlands and the North throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Unwin wrote:

Figure 34. The culs-de-sac and closes between Hampstead Way and the Hampstead Heath Extension, such as Linnell Close, here shown diagrammatdcally in Town Planning in Practice, provided the catalyst for the pedestrian circulation system of Radburn. Author's collection.

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The fact that many of these towns have already far exceeded the limit of size which is deemed desirable by the advocates of the Garden City . . . can hardly be urged as a good reason for making no protest against... [their] being allowed to continue to grow . . . swallowing up and obliterating the country all round.... The basic principle of organisation . . . should consist of a federation of groups constantly clustering around new subsidiary centres, each group limited to a size that can effectively keep in touch with and be controlled from the subsidiary centre . . .

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An examination of the map of London, and of many other large towns, will show how their growth has largely consisted in the absorption of older townlets or villages which had sprung up near the town around some centre point... The Garden City principle would recognise these centres, would maintain their definition by limiting their growth . . . in such a way as to preserve some belt of open country, meadow, park or woodland sufficient to give emphasis and oudine to each unit.35

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Diagrams, which were published internationally, contrasted the bylaw terraced development with the garden City type, which had the benefit of self-contained recreational facilities within the block backlands (fig. 37). Unwin had implemented a block of this type at Brentham, the pioneer garden suburb developed by Henry Vivian's Ealing Tenants from 1904, for which he prepared a revised plan in 1907 (fig. 38).36 The block system had made its appearance in a more distorted form at Hampstead Garden Suburb. It was to be used as the basis for a much more ambitious plan, nominally prepared in conjunction with Patrick Geddes, that Unwin designed in 1 9 ^ for the Garden Suburb of Marino on the northern fringes of Dublin. This ambitious scheme also fulfilled the criteria for the application of garden city principles to existing urban centers, as described above. Here the block concept, particularly in the center of the scheme, together with community facilities and a prototype pedestrian network, approached something like mature form (fig. 39).37 Regrettably, the onset of the First World War, the political troubles in Ireland, and the lack of funding for the project inhibited its development until the mid-r920S, when a revised plan was prepared by the Dublin city architect, Horace O'Rourke. Parallel with this, concern for definition of a highway hierarchy evolved. Already in t90i, in The Art of Building a Home, Unwin had advocated the use of lighdy paved "carriage drives," in contrast to the wide, cobbled streets of the Victorian bylaw suburb. Asmuns Place in Hampstead Garden Suburb, with its verdant tree planting, was a model of what might be achieved a few years later. A

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The Origins of the Garden City Neighborhood r 2 5

1913 lecture, "Roads and Streets," brought greater clarity: "Proper organic planning of road systems with a main frame of arterial highways, with secondary roads linking them up . . . and mere building streets not used for through traffic, will enable roads of many varying widths to be safely used."38 This brought closer the idea of a framework of distributor roads to define the boundaries of the neighborhood. The importance of a neighborhood concept, both in planning for new communities and in existing cities, was brought out by Unwin's visit to the United States in May t 9 u . He attended the Seventh National Conference on City Planning held in Philadelphia, but he also visited Chicago, where he was able to study the Burnham plan and look at the development of the park system. Indeed, this Chicago visit helped to raise Unwin's sights to develop a strategic level of city and regional planning, articulated by green spaces—but that is another story. He described the development of neighborhood parks and community centers as potential agents of social reconstruction:

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up and developed the ideas about neighborhood planning that were formulated in Chicago. During the 1920s the neighborhood concept could be found in Louis de Soissons's master plan for Welwyn Garden City (fig. 40),43 where in contrast to the beaux arts-influenced town center, the residential roads followed existing lanes and tracks to preserve natural features, and the railway lines divided the residential areas into three or four major components, each with local shops. During implementation, culs-de-sac and street blocks appeared (fig. 41). Parker developed similar themes in his interwar work at New Earswick, which also drew on theoretical layouts he had prepared shordy before the First World War. The neighborhood concept in recognizable form appeared in Parker's Wythenshawe plan of 1927-29, for the garden satellite of Manchester.44 Parker, together with Unwin and Ebenezer Howard, had visited New York in 1925 for the International Federation for Garden Cities and Town Planning Conference. They stayed on as guests of the Regional Planning Association of America.45 Parker was notably impressed by the development of the Westchester County parkways; he also saw pioneer developments by Wright and Stein such as Sunnyside Gardens. For their part, Wright and Stein had visited England in the early 1920s and had looked in detail at Letchworth, Hampstead Garden Suburb, and Welwyn Garden City.46 The transadantic linkage had become close, resulting in constructive dialogue and interchange of ideas.

They have now set themselves the task of providing a play ground of some sort within half a mile of every child's home within the city. Perhaps the most interesting point about these play-grounds is that they are becoming local civic centres.... The "field house" with the numerous activities centred there, is becoming the focus of the neighbourhood in which it exists; and the amorphous mass of humanity around it is beginning to take on a definite relation to the centre . . . as particles in a chemical solution group themselves into beautiful crystalline form about some central point of attraction.39

At Wythenshawe, Parker found the opportunity to implement the latest practice. Parkway roads and major distributors subdivided the setdement into a number of clearly defined neighborhoods. Parker was well aware of the emergence of the Radburn concept of separation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic (fig. 42): Unwin had been consulted when visiting the United States in October 1928 and had been "present at the birth," so to speak.47 At Wythenshawe Parker proposed his own variant of the system as the basis for detailed neighborhood design. When preparing his May 1928 "Report to the Wythenshawe Committee of the Corporation of Manchester," Parker informed councillors of the purchase of the Radburn site and the preliminary planning by "Mr Clarence Stein and Mr Henry W r i g h t . . . in association with Mr Robert D. Kohn and Mr Frederick L. Ackerman as consultants": "Starting with the thesis that town planning for the present motor age should be fundamentally different from what town planning has been in the past, they arrange . . . that no child shall have to cross a road on its way to or from school. This they accomplish by placing all the houses in cul-desac roads which open off the main roads and behind each house a footpath lead-

This simile recurred in his theoretical work for the remaining three decades of his life. It was also linked to the work of Geddes and to the sociological analysis postulated by J. H. Forshaw and Abercrombie in the wartime County of London Plan prepared in 1943.40 Unwin's visit to Chicago included Jane Addams' Hull House Settlement, and he spoke about the planning of Hampstead Garden Suburb at the City Club, introduced by Irving K. Pond. 41 The club acted as a focus for practical social concern. William E. Drummond, who had worked for Frank Lloyd Wright and Daniel H. Burnham before forming his own practice in 1909, was a prominent member of the Merchants Club of Chicago and took a great interest in social planning. Surely he was present to hear Unwin. This is important because Drummond later formulated a standard plan for repetition throughout the city and has been credited with coining the term neighborhood unit.42 Perry, with his background in the Progressive Reform movement, was also influenced by the Chicago school of sociology and appears to have picked

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Figure 40. Welwyn Garden City layout plan, r 921, by Louis de Soissons. Fitting the layout around existing rail lines produced several distinct neighborhoods; the town center was more formally treated. From C. B. Purdom, The Building of Satellite Towns. Author's collection.

ing to the park in which the school stands."48 Parker's diagrams (fig. 43) clearly showed the superblock form, and he introduced his own variants, including internal distributor roads, which broke down the complete pedestrian-vehicle separation. Parker justified this change by referring to the minimal internal traffic likely at that date on a British estate. He also observed, with more conviction, that the frequency of turns from the main distributor in the pure Radburn model constituted a traffic hazard. He was also enthusiastic about the hexagonal grid planning evolved by the Canadian Naulon Cauchon and showed a block diagram, with a honeycomb structure, opening out to reveal the school at its center. The argument about saving in road costs was also included, updating Unwin's message from Nothing Gainedby Overcrowding. In his 1928 plan, Parker was content to refer to "residential areas," but there is little doubt that neighborhood units had arrived in all but name. The incorporation of limited access parkway roads followed a year later, and the initial length of one, later named Princess Parkway, was opened in February 1932. Although not used throughout the estate, it was the parkways that fine-tuned the definition and use of neighborhood units. As Parker explained, "The basis of the planning of Wythenshawe has been

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the realisation that no road can now fulfil the functions of a through traffic road and a development road, and that [the former]... will in future be sited in open country, and that settlements and "Neighbourhood Units" will be planned between these through traffic roads."49

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Implementation was hindered by the economic depression of the early 1930s. However, by the mid-i93os, Wythenshawe had attained a population equal to the combined total of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities. The Bagueley, Northenden, and Northen Etchells neighborhoods, developed clockwise around Wythenshawe Park, the latter two separated from the former by the first section of Princess Parkway, showed the full variety of culs-de-sac and groupings, including a few of the Cauchon-inspired hexagons.50 Although these did not aspire to the elegance of Parker's 1928 diagram, the concept may be said to represent the English proto-neighborhood plan at its logical conclusion, interfacing with the innovative transadantic work of the 1920s. Walter Creese was so taken with the diagram that he contrasted it with a William Morris wallpaper to epitomize the Arts and Crafts origins of Parker's neighborhood planning. Creese concluded that "under the impetus of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the microform naturally and easily became the superform."51 This was an apt commentary on the culmination of the evolution of neighborhood planning in the English garden city, drawing the work back to its artistic roots.

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Alexander Bing, chairman of the newly formed City Housing Corporation, the company that would build Sunnyside Gardens and Radburn, sent architectplanner Clarence Stein and landscape architect-planner Henry Wright to England in 1924 to study Britain's new towns and its best housing designs. They started their inquiries at Welwyn Garden City with Ebenezer Howard, the father of the garden city movement, and continued their exploration at Letchworth Garden City south of Welwyn and at Hampstead Garden Suburb in northern London, where they met Raymond Unwin, the brilliant English housing architect and town planner,1 at his seventeenth-century home Wyldes on Hampstead Heath. Stein remembered "walking about Welwyn and [talking] with old Ebenezer," and he recalled thinking that "the underlying plan of Letchworth," which he visited with Unwin, "did not altogether work." He and Henry Wright were "most impressed by Hampstead Garden Suburb, [the] wonderful feeling... that [Parker and Unwin] had for the relation of buildings to the form of the land, to each other and to . . . background . . . foliage." Howard and Unwin, he later wrote, "were . . . great influences on my tWnking and working in those days."2

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This chapter argues that Stein and Wright's "Radburn" formulation was derived, in part, from Unwin's approach to urban layout as typified by some aspects of Hampstead Garden Suburb and that, after a "sea change," Stein evolved from it the Sunnyside and the Radburn plans and their descendants from 1924 to 1938. These layouts, published in the Town Planning Review in England in 1949 and 1950, were in turn a very strong influence on a number of British residential and commercial designs from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. The now expanded concepts then evolved into higher density forms of mixed residential use and were reinterpreted in North America in new towns and planned unit developments (PUDs) from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s at much lower residential densities, though with much more parklike pedestrian spaces. In this third transfer, the Hampstead and Radburn prototypes had a faint and fading influence on housing layout. Stein's recollection of his 1924 visit to England describes the precise starting point of a fifty-year process of mutual exchange of ideas between British and American architects, landscape architects, and community planners. These exchanges, these transfers of ideas, significandy influenced changes in the layouts of new residential communities in both countries. Stein, a born and bred New Yorker, worked all of his professional life in that city; he had considerable influence on New York City and State as well as on national urban policies, programs, and projects in housing and community planning. Stein's influence was exercised by extensive writing, by helping shape legislation and investment, in housing through design of innovative housing projects (always collaborating with others), and through his friends, the members of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), that extraordinary group of urban and regional planning intellectuals that he first convened and that he helped sustain in the decade from 1923 to 1934.3 Stein's "Manhattan transfers" all occurred through the well-known projects he designed and the letters, speeches, and articles that emerged from his New York City base of operation, his and the actress Aline MacMahon's West Side "sky parlor," their spacious apartment high above Central Park. Stein's transatlantic transfers of the British-inspired prototype residential layout ideas, now universally called "the Radburn plan," were in that sense "Manhattan transfers."4

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Inspiration and Development Hampstead Garden Suburb, a very special example of quality in residential layout, was the principal inspiration of Stein and Wright's urban design prototype, the starting point for Clarence Stein's design inventions. Hampstead Garden Suburb's Arts and Crafts houses, its tree-fined wandering and straight streets, its large blocks with abundant internal open space, its intimate closes and culs-de-sac, the broad spaces of Hampstead's gardens, the later more formal buildings by Lutyens along with the house-bordered spaces of Hampstead Heath, comprise an urban texture of informal ease and of great beauty (see figs. 32-37, above). Unwin and Parker designed its clearly structured matrix of streets, walks, gardens, and houses, supplemented by Lutyens' more formal buildings and spaces, in a balanced design approach to formal and informal beauty.5 In the next decade, after his visit with Unwin, Stein worked with Henry Wright to develop an equally clear differentiated street system with a continuous separate pedestrian and open space system in their 1928 design for the new community of Radburn, New Jersey (fig. 44). Like the plan for Hampstead Garden Suburb, the plan for Radbum's main roads provides a somewhat formal framework related to the alignment of local roads in the immediately surrounding region; and like the plan for Hampstead Garden Suburb, it has limited areas of more formal layout in its commercial and civic district. However, the Radburn plan possesses several qualities of regularity, not to say formality, that are not characteristic of its Hampstead prototype. First, Radburn's regularly repeated forms: cul-de-sac vehicular access roads varying from 100 to 350 feet deep lead rhythmically from the edges of the collector streets. Around the auto service culs-desac are grouped Radbum's single and duplex residential structures. They alternate with garden-side courts that lead to the shared park space. The second major difference between Unwin and Parker's design for Hampstead Garden Suburb and Stein and Wright's design is the continuity of the pedestrian path system and park at Radburn, which flows through the center of each block and into each "garden-side court" with footpath access to each dwelling unit. The third difference is the regular provision of pedestrian walk underpass connections between the superblocks. Hampstead Garden Suburb's large blocks sometimes suggest center block pedestrian circulation and shared internal landscaped open space, but they do not have the continuous, consistendy separate pedestrian circulation and park framework characteristic of the plan for Radburn. The innovation of the Radburn plan is its superblocks' separation of car and

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fie than Unwin's balanced formal-informal layout. Unwin seems to have adapted his own layouts of blocks, streets, and buildings to some of the existing footpaths in the Hampstead Heath area, but it seems not to have occurred to him to design a completely separated and continuous footpath system through all of the groups of houses and community buildings. After all, at that time virtually all wheeled traffic was horse-drawn. Stein and Wright made the pedestrian pathopen space system the "armature" of the Radburn plan, a unique addition to the choices of systems for town planning and for residential site planning. The Radburn footpath system also had more clearly delineated destinations than Unwin's paths. They connected more than the dwelling units to each other. Churches, schools, and large recreation areas, including playgrounds, playing fields, and swimming pools, were accessible along Radbum's footpath system. Stein and Wright stopped short of connecting the houses direcdy to the town's commercial center with a vehicle-free footpath system, but Stein's 1929 sketches for a Radburn local shopping center suggest that he was working on the problem of modern pedestrian-circulation-shaped commercial center design. The plan to complete Radburn was cut short by the cessation of residential building in 1931 during the depression—with less than one neighborhood completed.

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Stein and Wright adapted and modified Parker and Unwin's large block informal residential layout concepts to North America first in their designs for shared, joindy owned midblock spaces at Sunnyside Gardens, New York, in 1924 (fig. 45), then in 1928 in the very large superblocks of Radburn. Their higher density variations of this layout type at Chatham Village, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as well as in Stein's transmission of the Radburn layout system to the plans for the New Deal new town of Greenbelt, Maryland,6 and to the most advanced U.S. example at Baldwin Hills Village, California, further evolved the Radburn plan's clear separation of internal pedestrian circulation and shared park space with cul-de-sac vehicular access to houses.

T h e R a d b u r n Plan's T r a n s f e r t o British T o w n P l a n n i n g Figure 44. Clarence S. Stein and Henry Wright, plan of northwest and southwest residential districts, Radburn, N.J., November T929. Planning Perspectives. pedestrian access and its continuous center block park system. These characterize the "pure" Radburn plan idea. The discipline of Radbum's completely independent car and pedestrian systems and its fully continuous open space-footpath system is a much more advanced adaptation of residential layout to vehicular traf-

Publication of the Stein, Wright, and Associates' projects in the Town Planning Review in 1949 and 1950 by its editor, Gordon Stephenson, and separately in Stein's book Toward New Towns for America in 1951, initiated the second return transfer back to Britain of these now transformed ideas for residential layout. Within a few years these forms were evident in several new community designs: for example, in Stephenson's Wrexham project in Wales and in plans for many British New Town residential areas.

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The writer Lewis Mumford, architect-planner-author Gordon Stephenson, Coventry City architect Arthur G. Ling, Cumbernauld New Town chief architect Hugh Wilson, and architect-sociologist-writer Paul Ritter all played important roles in the introduction and adaptation to Great Britain of the Radburn approach to residential layout.7 There were, of course, other British advocates for making use of Stein's design innovations, usually in modified form, but these four architect-planners seem to have been the chief proponents of pedestrian oriented layouts, more or less related to the "Radburn plan," for large areas of new housing built in the "Mark I" New Towns and in city expansion schemes in the 1950s. Stephenson, a longtime friend and colleague of Stein's, visited him at Radburn in 1929 and in 1948.8 Stephenson studied city planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1930s during a period when Stein was sometimes a visiting lecturer.9 We know of no direct contact of Clarence Stein with Arthur Ling, Hugh Wilson, or Paul Ritter before the 1960s, but British architects and planners were much influenced by Arthur Ling's Coventry housing schemes and the pedestrian-favoring work of Wilson at Cumbernauld New Town in 1957, as well as by Ritter's intensive formal and social analysis of "Radburn plans"; the latter influenced British housing layouts from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s. The work and writing of these individuals mark the apogee of the Radburn plan's influence on residential layout in Britain.10 Stephenson's initial publication of Stein's projects in the October 1949 and January 1950 issues of Town Planning Review11 and his mid-1950 recruitment of Stein as a consultant for the design of the Stevenage New Town's central area did much to convince a handful of British planners that the Radburn plan with its emphasis on car-pedestrian segregation was a useful model for their own residential and town center designs. Stein's post-World War II meetings with Stephenson in New York, especially Stein's "self criticism of the details of walk width," stimulated the new University of Liverpool professor of civic design and editor of the Town Planning Review to persuade Stein to "write a critical appraisal of all of the major housing and planning projects with which [he] had been associated."12 Stephenson was "fascinated by . . . [Stein's] views . . . about details at Radburn and Baldwin Hills." He urged Stein to do "an article to follow his friend Lewis Mumford's" for the first number of the new volume.13 Stephenson also wrote to Catherine Bauer, who encouraged him to try to persuade Stein to write such an article. "Catherine," Stephenson noted, was to "be writing for a later number." 14 By mid-April 1949, Stein, intrigued by Stephenson's proposal,

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fied and enlarged from the 1950 proposal, has all the elements of a "Radburn plan" town center: the pedestrian-favoring superblock, specialized service and bus roads with concentrated parking in lots and structures, separation between pedestrians and vehicles, shops facing pedestrian promenades, and a pedestrian park as the spine (fig. 46).20 Stevenage Town Center was the first pedestrian-favoring New Town shopping center in Britain in part because of Stein's transfer of ideas and collaboration with Holliday and Stephenson. It is a true town center with a church, a library, a law court, official buildings, a dance hall, a bowling alley, an arts center, a recreation center, a county college, and a town garden, in addition to shops. At Stein's urging, pedestrian and cycle paths enter the center direcdy from surrounding residential neighborhoods and reach the rail station by a series of underpasses and bridges. Stein's 1929 access ideas for Radbum's center were realized at Stevenage. Its "grouping of shops in a pedestrian precinct with bus station and car parks close by . . . [make it] one of the finest modern town centers in Great Britain."21 The sketches and ideas that Stein provided its design team in r950 contributed much to these special qualities.22

had oudined and started the article and suggested two possible tides: "Motor Age Planning" or "Evolution of the Town of the Motor Age in America." Stein and his wife Aline MacMahon traveled to Europe in the summer of 1949. They ended their trip in England, where Stein spent several marathon editing sessions with Stephenson at Unwin's old home, Wyldes. Stein's two long articles were ready for publication in October 1949. The reaction to them was modest but enthusiastic, and Stephenson arranged for the University of Liverpool Press to print them (using the Town Planning Review's plates) as a book, Toward New Towns for America, which appeared late in 1951rs

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In 1950 Stephenson also suggested retaining Stein's services for one of his clients, the Stevenage New Town Corporation, which had retained him to consult on the plan for the town's central area. In July 1950 Stein sent diagrams for a pedestrian-favoring town center, with the dimensions, to Stephenson. Stephenson; Clifford Holliday, Stevenage's planning officer; and Stein spent several weeks in August and November 1950 in England developing a pedestrian oriented town center plan, the first in Britain, for Stevenage.16 After Stephenson's initial optimism that the corporation and the Ministry of Town and Country Planning would approve this plan,17 official fear developed that its pedestrian environment and the lack of automobile visibility of shops would repel potential merchants. The 1950 plan was scrapped, and in 1953 the corporation prepared a traditional town center plan with shop fronts along the center's streets. It was the new citizens of Stevenage who rescued the Stephenson-HollidayStein plan concept by seeking independent advice on the value of a pedestrian environment.18 The corporation summarized its caution and the resolution of the issue in its 1954 report: "[L]ocal opinion, as expressed by the County Council, the Stevenage Urban District Council and . . . local bodies representative of the residents, was strongly in favour of the exclusion of all vehicles from the shopping center. The Corporation have, accordingly, informed [the ministry] that, while they are still of the opinion that if vehicles are excluded from the streets in the shopping center rents are likely to be less in the early years than they would be if vehicles were allowed, they are anxious to go ahead in the way desired by local opinion, subject to [ministry] approval."19 The ministry approved the new pedestrian-favoring plan in 1955, and by the end of 1958 the Stevenage Town Center's first shops opened. The center's plan, though modi-

Adopting, and Adapting, t h e Radburn Plan While Stein's Town Planning Review articles were in the press, Stephenson worked on an opportunity as a housing consultant-designer to lay out 1,200 houses in the Queens Park Estate for the town council at Wrexham, Wales. He described the first 300 of those houses as "halfway to the Radburn system and important at this stage." He seems to have had in mind a long campaign to secure a more complete Radburn plan in the next 900 houses at Wrexham and perhaps other housing elsewhere.23 Stephenson's "halfway to Radburn" rating of the first Wrexham scheme (fig. 47) was in part a result of the narrowness of the garden courts and the park and the lack of complete continuity of pedestrian separation in the central green spaces of the overall plan for the estate and its connection to the school. There were also problems in securing house designs whose principal rooms and main entrances fronted on the shared garden court side.24 Wrexham's parking standards were also probably lower than Stephenson thought they should be. Nevertheless, the design received positive critical notices,25 and within a few years a number of town planning officers, city architects, and New Town architects were making serious efforts to develop Radburn plan housing layouts. These moves were serious enough to attract the special at-

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tention of Architectural Review critics J. M. Richards and Gordon Cullen in their general criticism of the lack of urbanity in the designs of the first post-World War II British New Towns. Rejection of "Radburn Ideas" also came from Lionel Brett in a subsequent issue of Architectural Review and in a 1955 presentation at an Architectural Association seminar in London. During construction of the houses at Wrexham, J. L. Womersley, who became city architect and town planner at Sheffield in 1953, started designs for a Radburn scheme at Greenhill-Bradway (fig. 48). Stephenson thought it "in some respects a further development o f . . . Wrexham [and] in other . . . [respects] nearer to Radburn." In Stourport, a small town on the Severn, Stephenson reported another "Radburn scheme" in 1954. The town's Housing Committee had "decided that its next housing area . . . [300 to 400 houses] . . . should be on Wrexham lines."26 This was Welshes Farm Estate (fig. 49). This early adapta-

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tion of the Radburn idea in England was heavily criticized for the tightness of its garden courts.27 The Greenhill-Bradway estate was another advance in use of a large "Radburn superblock" with almost complete footpath-vehicular segregation and with the main footpaths leading to schools and shops. In 1955 at Coventry, Arthur Ling, its chief architect, started the designs for Willenhall Wood, a large housing estate that had very deep parking courts alternating with extensive garden courts (fig. 50). The paths of these courts led conveniently to a nursery school and shops; however, no similar continuous pedestrian system served another large part of the housing surrounded by a loop road. Willenhall Wood's garage courts, which provided rear access to its houses, also bordered and screened each house's private garden in a layout similar to that of Stein and Robert Alexander's 1938 Baldwin Hills Village, California, town house plan.28 Those who wished British housing planners and architects would completely adapt the Radburn layout idea (making the appropriate changes in housing unit design and road systems that such adaptations required) were soon disappointed. In the first series of adaptations of the Radburn plan, the housing sites were smaller (25-30 acres) than the 80^120-acre sites Stein worked with at Radburn and Baldwin Hills Village. British planners seldom had access to the resources needed for even minimal roadway and pedestrian path separation by underpass or bridge. Some house plans and site layouts led to confusion between the fronts and backs of the houses, and children tended to play in the paved areas of garage courts. The popular desire was to have the house's "front" door facing the road. The tendency for guests and house owners to want to arrive at the house front by car was in conflict with the Radburn idea's concept that the "front" door was to be on the garden/pedestrian side of the house. Should visitors who arrived by car walk to the intended front door or take a shortcut up the garden to the back door? There was, as well, the tendency for British decision makers of the 1950s to choose "amenity with economy [rather than] a proper means of dealing with the motor car."29 These problems resulted in many hybrid or incomplete adaptations in the Radburn layouts by municipalities in the New Town corporations at Harlow, Stevenage (fig. 51), Basildon, Hemel Hempstead, and Letchworth (fig. 52). The economic pressures for higher densities and the critics' pressure for "urbanity" clashed with the reality of rapidly increasing automobile registrations. British planners and policymakers were slow to react to rapid post-1950 increases in car ownership and left parking standards in residential areas low (40-50% of dwelling units with spaces).

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14 dwellings per acre 61 persons per acre

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Figure 52. A British example of a hybrid of the Radburn idea, Jackmans Estate, Letchworth, ^58: Planning Perspectives.

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1. ploying field site 2. shops 1 public house Figure 51. Although its promoters described Elm Green Estate, Stevenage, as being "planned on Radburn principles," it represents an incomplete or hybrid adaptation of the Radburn idea. Planning Perspectives.

British town planners' city extension schemes and new town residential area designs in the middle to late 1950s showed a tendency to prefer garage parking to open car service courts in connectivity of the British "Radburn plan" pedestrian systems. Paul Ritter wrote favorably and extensively about these "hybrid Radburn plans" in his 1957 doctoral thesis at the University of Manchester and later in architectural journals and in his book Planning for Man and Motor?0 I •,

C u m b e r n a u l d : Britain's F i r s t " M o t o r A g e " T o w n The many versions of British adaptation of Stein and Wright's Radburn ideas fell short in detail and scale until 1956, when planning began for Cumbernauld, the only British New Town designated in the 1950s. Its very unconventional design for a town of 70,000 population near Glasgow, Scodand, provided for extensive, efficient, and safe pedestrian-vehicular systems; and it anticipated high levels of car ownership (one car per house plus visitor parking).31 Cumbernauld has separate circulation systems for vehicular and pedestrian traffic; and its plan reestablished the traditional residential density gradient of cities with high densities around the town center (120 persons per acre; 25-30 dwelling units per acre), falling off gradually toward the periphery of the town. Cumbernauld's very extensive pedestrian path system connected all of its residential areas direcdy to its town center by means of underpasses and footbridges. The footpaths never crossed the limited access trunk roads or primary roads except at these grade separations, where bus stops were located. The spine

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of the primary road system ran under the town center, where parking decks were connected by vertical circulation to shopping and other central services. Cumbernauld's innovations also extended to the design of many new variations of the "Radburn layout," in which designers experimented with hillside garage parking beneath houses and flats, parking courts perpendicular to the main directions of rows of houses, and some pedestrian access to houses parallel and adjacent to parking courts. These designs went far beyond the strict discipline of the "pure" Radburn plan to provide imaginative housing layouts. Cumbernauld's planners rejected the neighborhood concept. They provided safe and convenient car access and storage at the relatively high residential densities (20-30 dwelling units per acre) required by the plan in an effort to achieve social and visual urbanity.32 They "attempted to integrate house design and layout to ensure privacy to gardens and houses as well as safety for pedestrians and convenient access for vehicles . . . by careful design of house types related to the arrangement of the houses on the ground . . . [by] use of single aspect (one entrance) wide frontage . . . patio houses [and point block flats]."33

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The house "area" layouts at Cumbernauld dealt with the problems of "designing for the motor car" while using three strategies to achieve maximum separation of pedestrians and vehicles:

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The Radburn system with road access and pedestrian access to all or the majority of houses. . . [by] the use of about 70% wide frontage single aspect houses and 30% flats . . . giving [the] convenience of direct access to . .. house by car, in many cases with a garage adjoining . . . and entrance doors on either side of the house both leading into a common hall. . . A "meshed" system of roads and footpaths with . . . vehicles entering the site from the periphery . . . by the use of culs-de-sac, with pedestrians moving toward [the town center] by a series of spur footpaths linked to a main footpath. . . . All houses are approached by footpaths and garages [and parking areas] are grouped in blocks alongside the roads at the ends of terraces, a fairly adequate separation of vehicles and pedestrians although not so complete as with the Radburn system. . . . a housing area of say 200-250 houses surrounded by perimeter garaging resulting in a longer walk between garage and house but keeping the residential area clear of parked cars . . . 34

Figure 53. The only British New Town of the 1950s, Cumbernauld represented the fullest implementation of the Radburn idea to date. Detail of Carbrain area, Cumbernauld. Planning Perspectives.

of housing with play areas sited above the garages and parallel to the contours. Footpaths between the rows of housing connected to the main footpaths that ascended or descended the hillside to the town center, for example, in the Carbrain area (fig. 53). Planners and housing designers of Cumbernauld developed several new kinds of Radburn layout for "motor age" housing and incorporated some new ideas of their own that took advantage of the steeply sloping town site and made effective use of the corporation's policies of completely separating pedestrian and vehicular systems.3S Cumbernauld, the first British town to make use of a modern traffic model, acquired not only an efficient high speed, high capacity road system but also safer, quieter, and generally more livable pedestrian oriented residential areas than most British towns of its size.36 Cumbernauld's expansion in

Toddlers' play spaces were provided close to each group of houses and close to the connections between the spur paths and the main footpath systems. On the steeper parts of the hillside site, garages were provided beneath alternate rows

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the 1970s continued the policy and further evolved designs for pedestrian and vehicular circulation along the lines originally suggested by Clarence Stein and his associates at Radburn in 1928. The transfer of the Radburn idea appeared to have been complete by i960 even as it was transformed to meet British needs and values.37

These were streets where car drivers were to be made aware of the special pedestrian nature of the place by speed bumps; narrowed cul-de-sac entrances; changes in the color and texture of the street's paving; positioning of planters, trees, and other objects in the street adjacent to car lanes; provision of parking perpendicular to the curb; and other traffic-taming strategies. Such design ideas provided another means for achieving pedestrian safety where Radburn layouts were not financially feasible or wanted.

In the mid-1960s Cumbernauld's planners extended its footpath system to connect with pedestrian trails in the surrounding area and with the town expansion areas of more dispersed housing northwest of the original compact settlement. The original town footpaths were designed to "give pedestrians access to . . . the central area, major playing fields at the town edge, local shops, pubs, primary schools and toddlers' play areas."38 This system was then extended to peripheral areas, woodland walks, Cumbernauld Village, industrial areas, country walks already intensively used by the residents, the rail station, and the local golf course. These new paths required a number of additional grade separated crossings of trunk roads and the railway. The result, Cumbernauld's extensive and almost totally vehicle-separated pedestrian system, is among the most successful and complete such facilities in existence anywhere, exceeded for the comprehensive, continuous pedestrian path systems only by several of the Stockholm suburban satellite communities planned from 1948 to 1973, including Vallingby, Hisselby, Hisselby Strand, Farsta, Skarholmen, and Kista.

Radburn schemes were perceived by some in Great Britain to have failed their ideal: visitors arriving by car had access to houses only through kitchens; some residents disliked that and some wanted to make the vehicle access side of the house into an area for socialization, working, and repairing cars, and for children's play, including skateboarding, skating, and cycling, all of which needed large paved areas. The answer to these mixed car-pedestrian use needs was to design or redesign street space so that both needs could be met in the same space. The Dutch called such street designs woonerven. The British designers who first started making use of these ideas at Runcorn New Town in 1966 were, in part, responding to dissatisfaction with some of their Cheshire New Town's first Radburn plan housing. According to Paul Burrell, the "traditional Radburn plan . . . suffered the usual disadvantages of being 'misused' by residents who neither knew nor cared about the Radburn theory of how they were meant to behave." One of Runcorn's designers, an engineer, E. Jenkins, is said to have inspired the abandonment of "Radburn and segregation . . . to try a completely new approach" to the design of "The Brow... a residential estate... designed as a pedestrian area into which vehicles are allowed only on sufferance." At the Brow and Casde Fields, a subsequent 2,200-unit project, Runcorn's planners have used this approach, which then became known in Britain as the Runcorn philosophy.39 Elsewhere in Great Britain this innovative pedestrian-favoring design has been codified with the "shared cul-de-sac" approach published in design manuals in Cheshire and Essex. Designers of residential layouts in Great Britain now had at least three alternative models from which to choose: (1) the traditional, house-facing-thestreet plan, with housing parcel back lot lines (and gardens) abutting and blocks designed in some variation of a grid or in suburban twisty street patterns with culs-de-sac but no shared center block open space; (2) the Radburn plan; and (3) type 1 or 2 with "vehicle unfriendly" culs-de-sac and streets.

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Very few large-scale car-pedestrian separated high density new residential layouts of the type developed at Cumbernauld exist elsewhere in Great Britain. Smaller incremental housing development parcels and estates, at lower densities, are more often the case. But Radburn plans were not the only solution to conflicts between vehicles and playing children and walkers. Since there was a desire for residential environments where people and cars could conveniendy occupy the same street space in safety and visual compatibility, a new set of residential layout ideas evolved. It may have had its origins in existing towns and town extensions where it was not economically feasible to redesign areas for complete pedestrian-vehicular separation. In such places it seemed more convenient and natural to change the old or adopt new designs for street pavements with new walk-street-house layouts designed to "tame the car," to make it a friendly, slow-moving co-occupant of street spaces where pedestrians, including children, could move about in safety.

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The third transfer to and direct use in North America of Clarence Stein and Henry Wright's community design concepts, now everywhere called the "Radburn plan" in England, began in a limited way in the late 1950s. The first example was in a New Town design by Clarence Stein, Albert Mayer, and Julian Whittlesey at Kitimat, British Columbia, in 1951. The ideas also had considerable influence on Mayer, Whitdesey, Conklin, and Rossant's designs for Robert Simon's private-sector new town at Reston, Virginia, in 1957, and on William Finley and Morton Hoppenfeld's 1963 plans for James Rouse's new town for a population of 110,000 at Columbia, Maryland. At Columbia, Stein's book Toward New Towns for America was the planners' "bible."40

R e s t o n , Virginia The designers of Reston (fig. 54), Robert Simon's private-sector new community, incorporated the idea of linear green spaces that included pedestrian paths in each of the large blocks of the overall town plan. They also made extensive use of culs-de-sac in their 1957 housing layout. Reston's architect-planners Mayer, Whittlesey, Conldin, and Rossant did so within a framework of "villages" with collector streets and clearly structured boundary thoroughfares. However, Reston's connections to the Radburn idea seem to stop with these features. Neighborhoods were not a clearly defined unit of design within the villages, nor were they intended as school service areas or to encourage the formation of a social structure, though each housing subarea has a community association to which each homeowner must belong by deed restrictions. There is some continuity in the pedestrian walks, but they often cross collector streets and internal streets at grade. And the walks were not laid out to provide direct pedestrian access from residential areas to schools, community shopping centers, or the town center until Reston's new "traditional" town center was laid out in the late 1980s. There was an impulse to design a more consistendy separated and continuous pedestrian path system at Reston, but it was not fully carried out in the town plan; the first increment that was built featured a relatively dense "village center" at Lake Anne, designed with a clear preference for pedestrian spaces and a strong geometry. Its commercial core includes a loop of town houses around the hard-edged part of the lake border and informal groups of houses designed by

Figure 54. Mayer, Whitdesey, Conkin, and Rossant, designers; Robert Simon, developer, plan of the center of Reston, Virginia, and Lake Anne Village, 1990. Planning Perspectives.

Clothiel Woodward Smith around the softer edge of the balance of the lake (see fig. 58, below). This attractive design for Reston's first residential area, this charming urban tour de force of urban design, is generally explained by the influence of several Italian fishing villages on the image sought by its principal designer, James Rossant. The priorities of private-sector U.S. market-driven suburban new towns like Reston must by definition be different from those of the post-World War II British New Towns, whose goals included the dispersal of moderate- and lowincome workers and their families from congested, substandard housing of Lon-

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don, Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow. Large amounts of subsidized, affordable housing were built in the British New Towns and town expansion projects. Reston and most of the late-i950s and 1960s U.S. new communities were based on the financial capabilities of large-scale land developers like Simon and Rouse whose foremost goal was profit, followed by environmental quality and social equity. They built some "below market" housing (more often at Reston than at Columbia) at first but in small quantity. The creation of clearly structured separate systems for vehicles and pedestrians was a goal at Reston, but the vehicles were given first priority. Except for such quite beautiful designs as the romantic Dutch "pedestrian bridge" at one end of Lake Anne, the separation of walkers and cars was a very low priority. Reorganization after Reston's financial difficulties of the mid-1960s and again in the early 1970s left few resources for such "amenities" as footbridges or underpasses. Nevertheless, there are about twenty such grade separations in Reston. But the romantic informality of nineteenth-century suburban design that dominated Reston's first and later residential layouts excluded a regularly repeated Radburnesque path and plans that consistendy separated vehicle access by culde-sac and garden-side house fronts. Low density terraced houses or detached single-family house areas at Reston have parking courts that are hard-surfaced from curb to curb and are at times used for social life and children's play.

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Many of Reston's land development parcels were of considerably smaller acreage than those of British New Town housing areas or the large council housing projects of the larger city housing schemes in Britain. And local government subdivision regulations in Virginia require more or less uniformly wide streets, closing off the possibility of narrow entries for local streets. Finally, the preferences of private home builders and presumably their customers (both tenants and home buyers) were for home entrances (both "front" and "rear") that led direcdy from their private parking areas off streets or culs-de-sac. All of these factors worked against the possibility of footpath access to houses or indeed any of the meshed vehicle-pedestrian system of separate access that shaped Radburn. What is left of the Radburn idea at Reston is a fairly consistent use of linear center block open space in its large blocks, most of which include footpaths (some of the later ones were in golf course fairways) that were sometimes but not always connected between blocks under or over boundary streets by bridges or underpasses. Most paths are not focused on specific community destinations like schools, local shopping, or the town center. The latter, designed recendy on a traditional grid of streets, will have a wide pedestrian underpass connecting it to an adjacent residential area.41

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So, except for an echo of Radbum's green park superblock spines and the extensive use of cul-de-sac vehicular access to housing clusters, the characteristics of the Radburn system were not employed in the design of Reston. Its import of ideas from Europe seems limited to the undoubted urbanity of the Lake Anne village center. Stein and Wright's Radburn idea did not make a full transfer from Manhattan via Europe back to the United States, or even an indirect transfer of any of its designers' (especially Whittlesey's) undoubted knowledge of modifications of the Radburn plan in Britain in the mid-1950s.

Columbia, Maryland The argument that Reston and Columbia (fig. 55) represent a third transfer of Stein's ideas from their evolution in Great Britain and Sweden to the United States is not strong.42 But we know that there was direct influence by Stein on Reston and Columbia planners through example and publication. Indirecdy he influenced Columbia's design through his RPAA colleague Catherine Bauer, who was a teacher of both of Columbia's town planners, William Finley and Morton Hoppenfeld. Both were graduates of the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1950s. Julian Whitdesey, a central figure in Reston's early planning, began his long, close association with Albert Mayer in the planning of Chandigarh and with Stein at ALCAN's huge Kitimat-Kemano aluminum processing facility in British Columbia, from 1951 to the 1960s. And so it is not surprising to find the classic Radburn layout at Kitimat and elements of it in terms of continuous open space woven through an informal sinuous urban fabric at Reston and Columbia. Their residential layouts possess many of the general features of the Radburn idea, but in their details (and in some of their critical general features) they vary considerably from a pure Radburn model. First, their houses' entrances are almost invariably on their street, cul-de-sac, or parkingcourt side. Second, their open space path systems, especially those of Columbia, are much wider than Radbum's, but the paths are not fully continuous. Instead, in many parts of Columbia and a few parts of Reston, these open spaces form rather large, linear, parklike natural areas. They are accessible from the backyards of many of the detached single-family houses and from the rear of terraced house clusters (or town house clusters—the term Rouse's town planners preferred in deference to suburban preferences at Columbia) and apartment building clusters. These Columbia open space systems are generally accessible from the ends of culs-de-sac and the corners of parking courts, but there are few front doors leading direcdy to garden courts or open space.

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(Route 29) near its town center-regional shopping mall, was financed by private donations in the mid-1980s. County or local public works departments, boards of education, and county park systems all seem totally uninterested in designating, financing, or building pedestrian underpasses and bridges. Land planners at Columbia have suggested bridge and underpass building by the Maryland State Highway Department (for state roads) or by the Columbia Association, a large homeowners association (for local collectors); but these organizations seem to have no interest in, let alone enthusiasm for, funding public works for pedestrians.43 A policy or system for financing these expensive structures seems not to exist in U.S. private-sector new towns. Without an organization that advocates and is willing to pay for pedestrian separation, like some of the British New Town corporations, it seems highly unlikely that this attractive social, safety-amenity feature of the Radburn idea will be included in any U.S. residential layouts.

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Figure 55. William Finley and Morton Hoppenfeld, plan of the center of Columbia, Maryland. Planning Perspectives. The lack of full continuity in the pathway systems at Columbia, as at Reston, is explained by the economy of infrastructure financing in American suburban counties. Private-sector land development companies like the Rouse Company's Columbia subsidiary, the Howard Research and Development Company, are now generally unwilling and were financially unable (after the first few years of very idealized development) to build underpasses or bridges at pedestrian crossings of trunk roads or main collector streets. There are only eight such pedestrian grade separations at Columbia, a town of 88,254 residents in 2000. All but one were built in early years. A more recent new pedestrian bridge, connecting the east and west sides of Columbia over a major state four-lane expressway

So although there are Radburnesque elements in the designs of large parts of Reston, Columbia, as well as Woodlands, Texas, and other private-sector new communities and planned unit developments (PUDs) in the United States, their larger fabrics seldom incorporate shared garden courts that lead from the front doors of residences to larger shared open spaces, nor the service-side automobile access or garage courts best typified by Stein and Wright's designs at Chatham Village in Pittsburgh and the Stein-shaped plan for Baldwin Hills Village in Los Angeles. In some of the American private-sector new towns, shared open spaces have become much larger than their British predecessors; they frequendy follow stream valleys between residential clusters, but they do not provide fully continuous path systems uninterrupted by grade crossings at major roads and collector streets. These adaptations or hybridizations of the Radburn plan in U.S. new towns and PUDs are built at much lower densities than their British counterparts. Direct connection of footpaths in residential areas to destinations such as schools or town centers are less common than those systems in Britain. Conversely, many British hybridizations of the Radburn idea are generally built at much higher densities than Radburn, and many use garden front entrances. Only in the case of Cumbernauld do they carry out the fully continuous path system element of the Radburn idea. It seems clear that the broad acceptance and transfer over time of an idea, even one as compelling as the Radburn housing and town layout idea, faces many practical and lifestyle barriers. The expense of urbanizing land often overrules the provision of the amount of shared open space that might make a desirable

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and desired Radburn layout possible in the United States. Despite the economies of the full Radburn plan, public treasuries are not often sufficiendy rich to provide such amenities-safety features as the underpasses or bridges needed for a continuous pedestrian system over a large urban fabric. And U.S. housing consumers may prefer to have their cars stored and displayed near the house's front door. This makes it difficult to totally segregate car storage and to avoid the use of parking areas for socializing and children's play. Perhaps many people in North America (and increasingly in Britain as well) will want a richer (yet safe) mixture of cars and people in their streets and neighborhoods than the Radburn idea calls for, if indeed they want any auto traffic-pedestrian traffic separation or any clearly defined neighborhoods at all. It seems that Eugenie Birch may be correct in her conclusion that "Radburn has been an important influence in the intellectual tradition of the American planning movement... a permanent icon in the field's literature . . . [but] as an applied pattern, it has failed to be a determining force."44 Nevertheless, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright's Radburn plan invention strongly influenced several key community plans in Great Britain, Scandinavia, and North America and has played an important role in the evolution of thought about the structure and design of British, European, and American residential areas for the last sixty years.45 The designs of linear open space systems making use of stream valleys at Reston and Columbia were influenced by both the Radburn idea and the values of their environmentally responsible developers and designers. Planned unit development and the clustered residential development in America can also be traced to the Radburn concept that Stein and Wright first developed in ^ 2 8 . The "triple transfer" of-the ideas inspired by Unwin's Hampstead Garden Suburb from Great Britain to the United States, then to England and back to North America is a fact: Parker and Unwin to Stein and Wright; to Stephenson; to Stein, Whitdesey, Finley, and Hoppenfeld, a triple play after which the idea, at least in its pure form, and the players fade out in the mid-1970s.

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In the first chapter of HomefromNowhere, the New Urbanist critic James Howard Kunsder describes a scene at Seaside, Florida, in which the leading New Urbanist architects sit around and try to figure out why postwar American building and design had become, in Kunsder's words, "such an abysmal mess." The answer, Kunsder argues, is a version of "Victory Disease" after World War II. The war had been so cataclysmic that it caused Western civilization to have a kind of stroke and forget much of its learning. And when the men who fought the war came home, they were so bored by everyday life that they drifted into a semialcoholic stupor and did not really care about the world they were creating.1 Kunsder is half-joking, of course. But there is no question that these ideas, however good-naturedly put forth, arise from a persistent historical theory on the part of the New Urbanists: somehow American architects and planners fell into a kind of amnesia in the postwar years—maybe even in the late 1930s— from which they did not recover until sometime in the t98os. Seduced by the car and by modern suburbia, they "forgot" all the universal truths about city design that had been practiced across cultures and over thousands of years. Instead

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they constructed a built environment that is, in the hyperbolic Kunsder's words, "depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading."2 In other words, so far as the New Urbanists are concerned, something went terribly wrong during the suburban era, and they struggle against credibility in trying to explain what happened. For example, one recent New Urbanist manifesto, Suburban Nation, is a lively assessment of the costs and consequences of sprawl, but its historical grounding, its explanations of causation, are less compelling than the authors' passionate quest for solutions.3 Part of the reason the New Urbanists are so mystified by the development of postwar America is that they do not always understand the historical processes that created suburbia and stimulated interest in their own movement. This is not surprising: despite their emphasis on "traditional" principles, the New Urbanists are practitioners, not historians, and they are working rapidly to meet current economic and political needs. But the debate over the New Urbanism— which is often shrill or at least emotionally charged on all sides—would benefit from historical perspective. When viewed in a historical context, the New Urbanism can be properly understood as the continuation of a long-running intellectual struggle between two competing philosophies of urban design, which are perhaps best identified as the formal and the informal. Much of the friction between New Urbanists and other designers stems from the fact that the American suburban tradition for the last half century has clearly fallen within the informal philosophy, whereas the core of New Urbanist design philosophy is formal in its approach.

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In point of fact, most successful communities contain elements of both philosophies. The true test of the New Urbanism will not be how purely it is created "on the ground." Rather, the test will be whether its most powerful ideas can be put into widespread use and combined with other powerful ideas, such as those from the informal tradition, to make better and more attractive communities.

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At its root, the New Urbanism is, as Vincent Scully once observed, really the New Suburbanism, because its original impetus was to create in systematic fashr ion the components required for a "better" American suburb.4 In this regard, it emerges very much from the American new town tradition—an American adaptation of Ebenezer Howard's garden city idea.

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The new town movement, and the garden suburbs that resulted, had garden city intentions but did not reflect a full realization of the garden city principles. Garden cities were designed to be self-contained, independent cities. But in the United States, which was quickly becoming metropolitan in nature, such a selfcontained community was virtually impossible to create. So in America, the garden city idea was transformed into the "garden suburb"—communities that embodied many of Howard's ideas but were not self-contained. According to Lewis Mumford, the most essential parts of Howard's garden cities concept, "balance, variety, and manifoldness of urban function," were not implemented in garden suburbs, and thus, they were not true garden cities: "[N]othing can be properly called a garden city that is not a complete and diversified urban community with its own industry."5 The American garden suburb movement, as distinct from Howard's garden city idea, is best epitomized by Radburn, New Jersey, and the federal greenbelt towns dating from the 1930s. No matter what underlying design philosophy it has embraced, the new town movement—including the New Urbanism—has always included a core set of community values. According to historian Suzanne Rhees, these principles include — — — — — —

an interconnected but variable street pattern an open space system a hierarchy of streets designed with shade trees and sidewalks a town or neighborhood center a separation of industrial uses from the rest of the community the use of "revival" or Art Deco architectural styles6

To this list might be added the general goal of achieving pedestrian orientation at the neighborhood level, so that residents need not use their cars, at least not for daily errands. The New Urbanism embraces all of these principles. Where it parts company from many of its new town predecessors is in its apparent rejection of the informal design philosophy.

N e w Towns and Informal Design: T h e Garden Suburb Model Ebenezer Howard's garden city concept was first implemented in England and came only later to the United States, where enthusiastic advocates ranging

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from John Nolen to Clarence Stein embraced it. Howard's original idea was that the garden city would be a self-contained community with industry, agriculture, and commerce. Initially, such practitioners as Nolen began to apply garden city concepts to industrial "company towns" in rural areas—in large part because their clients were the industrialists who owned the factories.7 Early on, many elements of the garden city idea were applied not to self-contained towns but to metropolitan suburbs—first at Hampstead Garden Suburb in London (designed by Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, designers of Letchworth Garden City) and later at Forest Hills Gardens in New York (designed by Grosvenor Atterbury, with site planning by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.). By the 1920s this trend became more pronounced, because it had become abundandy clear that American city development was fostering large-scale metropolitan agglomeration rather than the design and construction of self-contained towns. It was in this context that the idea of the American garden suburb became dominant—principally because of Radburn, New Jersey, which was designed by Stein and Henry Wright and only partly built before the Great Depression. Stein always acknowledged that Radburn was not a true garden city because practicalities forced the development to surrender both local industry and a complete greenbelt. "Radburn," he later wrote, "had to accept the role of a suburb." 8 The notion of Radburn as a garden suburb was definitely a modification of Howard's idea. But it was not completely inconsistent with the overall philosophy of metropolitan growth that Stein and Wright developed as part of the Regional Planning Association of America, which called for a planned and orderly decentralization of the population into smaller nodes that were safe, affordable, and accessible to open space.9

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In accepting such a role, however, Radburn became the model of the garden suburb, influencing virtually all subsequent suburban development, including those suburbs designed during America's supposed amnesia period after World Warn. Radburn and the federal greenbelt towns of the 1930s, which were designed based on Stein's criteria, are true garden suburbs in the sense that they use naturalistic elements, rather than buildings and streets, as their focal point. In this sense the garden suburb is akin to the quintessential suburban community of Riverside, Illinois, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. in 1868. Riverside is based on the landscape architecture approach of manipulating nature to create an artificial yet compelling naturalistic setting, responding, obviously, to the inhuman nature of the crowded industrial city.

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In particular, Stein and Wright accepted Clarence Perry's notion of the somewhat self-contained neighborhood unit as the building block of the community.10 Reacting to the city's congested and dangerous grid patterns, Stein and Wright adopted the superblock as the basic component of design and the complete separation of pedestrian and automobile as a basic principle. This led them inevitably to the use of several important design elements, including the famous greenways toward which the houses are oriented; the "service lanes" that provided vehicular access to the backs of the houses; curvilinear streets and some culs-de-sac; and the underpasses, like those in Central Park, that separated pedestrian traffic from the roadways. Radburn became a successful model for many reasons, but perhaps the most important was that in its design Stein and Wright accepted the challenge of integrating the automobile into the community without surrendering the goal of allowing families and children to walk to everyday destinations. Mumford referred to this innovation as the "Radburn idea," which he believed distinguished it from Howard's garden city idea. This American innovation provided the basic design formula that was used in virtually every American new town built until 1980, including the greenbelt towns of the 1930s, the private new towns of Reston and Columbia in the 1960s, the federal new communities of the 1960s and the 1970s,11 and the large-scale "master-planned communities" in California such as Irvine, Valencia, and Wesdake Village. Well into the t96os, Stein remained in contact with William Pereira and his staff in Los Angeles, designers of Irvine and other California new towns.12 Perhaps most important for our discussion of New Urbanism, many elements of the Stein-Wright garden suburb model were easily bastardized for mass consumption by the production-oriented American real estate development industry. Local streets needed to be nothing more than "service lanes," without landscaping or sidewalks. The greenways toward which the homes were oriented could be converted into golf courses (which produced revenue and enhanced home value) or sliced up into fenced backyards in keeping with the American taste for private space. Most sadly, the overpasses and underpasses could be dispensed with in order to save infrastructure costs, thus eliminating the possibility of easy pedestrian access to civic and commercial areas.

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William Fulton

C r i t i c i s m of I n f o r m a l D e s i g n : F r o m Jacobs to N e w Urbanists From the beginning, advocates of a more formal school of new town design were critical of the garden suburb concept even as they themselves found inspiration in the whole garden city philosophy. These critics came from many quarters over the decades, and not all of them were predecessors to the group that we would today call New Urbanists. Many critics of informal design were really opponents of modernist architecture who saw a connection between the informal tradition and the work of architects like Le Corbusier, who advocated the combination of broad expanses of space (some of it green) as part of his high-rise urban model.13 Beginning in the late 1950s, when Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte began writing about cities, an open rift emerged between these new defenders of crowded and untidy urban neighborhoods and the older advocates of garden cities and garden suburbs. Jacobs and Whyte were not really formalists; indeed, they were not even trained designers. Rather, they were journalists acting as sociologists, observing what seemed to be working on the streets of New>York. What was important about their work—especially that of Jacobs—was its defense of more traditional neighborhood design pattern. In Jacobs' view, the critical design elements for successful neighborhoods were houses that face the street and a grid street system that ensured busy sidewalks—exacdy the arguments made by the New Urbanists, in a more suburban context, almost forty years later. However, in making her argument, she set her sights direcdy on Howard, claiming that he "set spinning powerful and city-destroying ideas." Howard, she argued, "simply wrote off the intricate, many-faceted, cultural life of the metropolis." Her bottom line on Howard was that he "made sense in his own terms but none in terms of city planning."14 The hostility of criticism on both sides was intense. Reassessing the impact of Stein's TowardNew Townsfor America in 1965, Lewis Mumford wrote that "the very tide seems to provoke such violent opposition that its critics never go so far as to read the book. One would think that 'garden' was another name for 'open sewer.'"15 Meanwhile, Mumford himself was equally acidic. He derided Jacobs in a long New Yorker piece entided "Mother Jacobs' Home Remedies for Urban Cancer," declaring: "Her simple formula does not suggest that her eyes have ever been hurt by ugliness, disorder, confusion, or her ears offended by the roar of trucks smashing through a once quiet residential neighborhood, or her nose as-

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saulted by the chronic odors of ill-ventilated, unsunned housing at the slum standards of congestion that alone meet her ideal standards for residential density."16 In his memoir he expressed his continuing distaste for her "naive anti-esthetic dogmas on planning."17 Despite the criticism, from the beginning of their movement, the New Urbanists embraced certain garden city ideas. Most particularly, the neighborhood unit concept—with its carefully thought out understanding of what civic and business activities should be integrated into the daily, pedestrian oriented life of the neighborhood—provided an important building block for the New Urbanists just as it had for the garden city advocates. Andres Duany wrote an introduction to a new edition of Unwin's 1909 classic Town Planning in Practice.ls Other historians have also recognized the connection. As Walter Creese wrote in 1992, "[t]he resort plan of Seaside [designed by Duany and his partner, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk] is based on the planning habits of Raymond Unwin and one of his American disciples, John Nolen of Massachusetts."19 But at the same time, the New Urbanists often explicidy rejected informalstyle designs, even when they were based on garden city ideas. Indeed, the stimulus for their movement came largely from their distaste for the postwar suburr ban form, which, though highly bastardized, was based on the Radburn model. Even good modern representations of the Radburn model were subject to criticism. For example, the New Urbanist movement has debated vigorously whether to classify the famous Village Homes project in Davis, California, a classic Steinstyle informal design with pedestrian greenways, as true New Urbanism.20 One enlightening episode occurred in 1997, when an unsuspecting commentator wandered into the Congress for the New Urbanism's Internet listserv and asked a seemingly innocent question: "What's the current status of discussion within the N U movement about Radburn, the Stein approach, etc.?" The question elicited a deluge of responses, most of which took great pains to explain why Radburn was "not NU." Perhaps the most erudite of these response came from designer John Montague Massengale, best known as coeditor of The Anglo-American Suburb, an early New Urbanist^style tract. "Radburn is clearly not NU," he wrote. "Stein was very traditional at one point, of course, but as he got older he changed. That's not because he got better, but because he reflected the Zeitgeist, which was increasingly Modernist."21 No New Urbanist treatise ever stated so concisely the N U case against Stein. Massengale reiterated what seems to be the biggest difference between Stein and the New Urbanists: the belief among New

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Urbanists that a multipurpose street, which Stein deliberately avoided, should be the focal point of neighborhood design. He suggested that a true New Urbanist design would convert Stein's greenways into streets and service lanes into alleys.22

J o h n N o l e n and the Formalist Tradition

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One interesting sidelight in the formal/informal debate within New Urbanism is that it has revived the design reputation of John Nolen, one of the most prolific early city planning consultants. Nolen is most frequendy viewed as the P. T. Barnum of early-twentieth-century city planning, a man who used his considerable public relations and networking skills to promote the idea of city planning as a profession. But as a designer, Nolen has traditionally been judged as merely workmanlike compared to such contemporaries as Stein and Wright and the Olmsted brothers.

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Yet Andres Duany especially has used Nolen's work as a touchstone for his own design philosophy. Duany frequendy points to Nolen's formalistic designs, his focus on prominent civic spaces, and his creative use of modified grid street systems.23 Duany is especially admiring of Nolen's famous design for Venice, Florida. Thus, the New Urbanists dismiss Stein and embrace Nolen faster than one might expect. For this reason, the formal/informal debate is sometimes boiled down, in the shorthand of rhetoric, to "Nolen vs. Stein." There is some truth to this characterization. Yet such a dichotomy is rich with irony, because there is a great deal of overlap between Nolen and Stein that reveals how the formal and informal design traditions are intertwined. It is these continuities, these common practices, rather than the differences, that contribute to a richer understanding of the invaluable role that both traditions have provided to American community design.

formal approach tended to follow the lines of topography with asymmetrical and curvilinear patterns; the formal approach derived from Baroque-era ideas of axiality, symmetry, and rational progression imposed on the site. Nolen followed this eclectic design philosophy through much of his planning career."24 In Mumford's view, Nolen created the one new town that came closest to Howard's ideal of a self-contained industrial city, Kingsport, Tennessee, which was designed in the teens.25 But in the 1920s, Nolen turned his attention to suburbs, as did other designers. Like Stein, Nolen designed one garden suburb— Mariemont, Ohio, outside Cincinnati, in the early 1920s—that was meant to serve as a national model for a suburban new town in a metropolitan area.26 Like his plan for Venice, which followed it by a few years, Nolen's plan for Mariemont incorporated both formal and informal elements. The civic and commercial spaces tend to reflect the formalistic tradition. This part of the Mariemont plan (like the commercial and civic parts of the Venice plan) looks almost as if it could have been produced today by Duany Plater-Zyberk's office. But the residential areas, like those of Welwyn Garden City, tend to reflect an Olmstedian informality. Nolen's plan for the large-lot residential areas of Mariemont and many other communities is clearly influenced by Riverside and other Olmsted suburbs. Looking back across the modernist divide, it is tempting to conclude that this melding of traditions was the real strength of community planning in the pre-World War II era. It is also worth pointing out that, despite his office's formalist bent, two of Nolen's assistants went on to work with Stein in planning the decidedly informal federal greenbelt towns of the 1930s. Justin Hartzog and Hale Walker had been Nolen's longest-serving designers during the 1920s, when the office created Mariemont, Venice, and many other famous designs. In the 1930s, both went to the Resettlement Administration, Hartzog as the chief planner for Greenhills, Ohio, and Walker as the chief planner for Greenbelt, Maryland, which Stein viewed as the most fully realized garden suburb.27

Nolen was, indeed, a strong adherent of formal street patterns that give prominence to civic and community buildings, just as Duany and other New Urbanists are. Yet he was well schooled in the informal design tradition as well, and it influenced his work throughout his career. Nolen studied landscape architecture at Harvard, where he learned from his professor, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., about the significance of using both formal and informal design traditions. As James Arthur Glass wrote in his Cornell master's thesis on Nolen: "Olmsted . . . stressed both the informal and formal traditions in landscape design. The in-

W h y Informality W o n O u t For many years, John Nolen served as the guest lecturer on new towns in the city planning programs at both Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which were then the only academic programs in the country. In 193 5 his good friend Frederick J. Adams, head of the MIT program, asked Nolen to lec^ ture instead on "Subsistence Homesteads" because the students had already

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heard from Stein on the topic of new towns.28 The anecdote suggests just how much the balance between the formal and informal approaches had changed since Nolen began lecturing in 1928. It undoubtedly seems more ironic to historians today than it did to Nolen that Adams invited the longtime proponent of new communities organized around impressive civic spaces to speak instead about a topic that reflected the harsh economic realities of the Great Depression. Ever pragmatic, Nolen undoubtedly saw this not as a subject of secondary importance but as an opportunity to educate the next generation of planners about an issue crucial to the nation and to their profession. In part, this was the result of sheer economics. New towns with strong town centers have always been difficult to manage financially because of the up-front cost; and after 1926 or so, when the decade's notorious real estate bubble began to burst, it was simply impossible to get ambitious new towns off the ground.29 Of course, Radburn fell victim to this same problem, because it too had heavy up-front infrastructure costs that could not withstand the onset of the depression. Nevertheless, Stein understood much better than Nolen the need to build new towns in the most economical manner possible. His approach emphasized servicing daily economic and community needs, such as shopping, rather than creating a grandiose sense of civic identity through site planning and public buildings. It is probably fair to say that Stein, who flirted with socialism throughout his life, believed that a sense of community identity would emerge from the social organization of his towns rather than the creation of civic monuments.30 Stein spent a great deal of time, both at Radburn and with the Resettlement Administration, on market studies and financial calculations. At Greenbelt, Maryland, for example, he criticized the house layouts and house designs as "unpardonably wasteful."31 This philosophy was very much in keeping with the public policy approach of the 1930s, which focused on creating housing inexpensively rather than creating whole communities.32 It is also worth noting that, beginning in the latter half of the 1920s, auto traffic grew much more dramatically than any designer could have predicted, raising questions about the viability of traditional town-center designs. Nolen's designs simply never took account of this fact, and many of his graceful town centers, such as Mariemont, quickly grew clogged with traffic. Stein, by contrast, designed Radburn as "a town for the motor age" and sought to separate cars and pedestrians as a way of allowing both to travel freely.33 In short, it was the suburb part of the garden suburb, as much as the garden part, that allowed the informal tradition to gain popularity.

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169

Informal design prevailed over formal design beginning in the 1930s not because of a national amnesia or some kind of "Victory Disease" but because it was a design idea that seemed to address the needs of the time more realistically. In either pure or bastardized form, it could deliver houses more cheaply and accommodate auto traffic more efficiendy, thus responding to what seemed to be the two most pressing problems at the time. What was lost, of course, was an emphasis on the public realm, which stands at the center of the formal tradition. This formal public realm is represented by the structure and design of town centers to include grandiose civic buildings mixed with formal public meeting places. The formal public realm may also be referred to as the civic realm and is distinct from the informal public realm, which implies the manifestation of public and social gathering through greenbelts and other informal open space. Even in the 1920s, when Nolen was at the peak of his influence, the formal public, or civic, realm—with its emphasis on prominent civic buildings and formalistic streetscape—was viewed as an important building block (and selling point) for new communities. One of the most important contributions of the New Urbanists, then, has been to reemphasize the importance of the public realm generally and civic buildings in particular. The lesson they draw from a half century of informalism is that community identity cannot be created entirely from social organization and economic activity. It also requires a "centered" physical manifestation.

R e c a p t u r i n g t h e Balance b e t w e e n F o r m a l a n d I n f o r m a l It is perhaps fitting that many of the Stein-influenced new yowns of the 1960s are now building commercial centers that draw heavily on the New Urbanism. In part, this is a happy consequence of one seemingly unhappy reality about American new towns. Metropolitan economics in this country requires us to build houses first in order to establish the market viability of a particular location. Shopping and office facilities are often built many years or even decades after the houses. At both Reston, in Virginia, and Valencia, in California, Stein-style residential neighborhoods were built beginning in the 1960s, with informal architecture, naturalistic pedestrian "greenways," and other features clearly derived from Radburn and the greenbelt towns. Now that these communities are ripe for town centers, the developers are following the current trend of using New

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Urbanist-style formalism in their design. For example, at Valencia, Slddmore Owings & Merrill and EDAW have recendy designed Town Center Drive, which, according to one commentator, "reflects both research and genuine respect for the jpedestrian experience."34 At Reston, the downtown-style center boasts "a pedestrian-oriented development in an otherwise automobile-oriented New Town," which delivers a freedom of lifestyle and opportunity.35

F i v e

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T r a c i n g H o w a r d ' s L e g a c y in T w e n t i e t h - C e n t u r y Residential Planning

This trend may suggest, as Nolen learned from Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. almost a century ago, that the formal and the informal fit together more successfully than many New Urbanists are willing to admit. The formal and the informal are the yin and yang of garden city design. Both are required, and neither can be ignored. If the New Urbanism is to fulfill its early promise of reestablishing successful formulas for American community design, and especially if it hopes to navigate the transition from a suburban to a metropolitan landscape, the movement must understand the lessons history teaches us about the valuable components of informalism and the power of commingling the two traditions, rather than simply railing against informalism as impure.

Eugenie L. Birch

Since the publication of To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1898, at least five generations of American and English planners have found Ebenezer Howard's basic tenets viable and worth adapting for their times. Probably another five generations of planners worldwide will do the same, well into the twenty-first century. From-an early-twenty-first-century perch, indications of this past and present transferability are clear. Also evident is that future applications are evolving from this work. In a special section of the Journal of the American Planning Association commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of Howard's publication, urban historians Robert Fishman and Daniel Schaffer agreed that To-morrow's concepts, distilled to their essentials, have much to recommend them and argued that their intrinsic worth will cause them to resonate well into the future.1 From the historians' assessments and close reading of To-morrow, the legacy is clear. Schaffer captured a good part of it in recognizing Howard's "common sense approach to urban development" and in summarizing his simple prescriptions: "Keep your setdements compact... provide for open space; separate residential areas from industrial zones but not from commercial establishments;

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Five Generations of the Garden City

build housing that people can afford and create a p l a n . . . that is flexible and responsive to people's needs."2 Fishman concurred, reporting that "[a]fter a hundred years, we can now grasp the basic unity that underlies all Garden City/New Towns manifestations . . . the human-scaled community, compact and diverse, . . . embedded in a green, natural environment." Fishman further observed that amid today's urban sprawl (a phenomenon a nineteenth-century stenographer could never have envisioned), "the marriage of town and country remains Howard's enduring idea."3

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find formulas that would marry town and country yet still be politically, economically, and socially feasible. In the process they discovered that some versions would be more successful than others as the environment in which they were working circumscribed and defined the degree to which they could develop the principles. Table 2 provides a summary of these efforts.7 In the first generation, spanning 1900 to the 1930s, British and American designers executed model cities while theorists codified an expanded definition of their qualities. Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker's work at Hampstead Garden Suburb and Letchworth Garden City incorporated the green space, compactness, affordability, functional separation, community facilities, and transportation features central to Howard's idea. Unwin described his methods for this in Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction of the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs (1909).8 Clarence Stein and Henry Wright's more modest experiments at Sunnyside, in Queens, and at Radburn, New Jersey, also included these ideas but added a refinement: the pedestrian-vehicular separation innovation that would come to be known as the "Radburn idea." Their plans also incorporated the ward concept, now called the neighborhood unit and further elaborated by Clarence Perry, a social reformer and author.

Also integral to Howard's ideas is the assumption that designers will subdivide the larger garden city into smaller, manageable units or wards. In fact, what he had in mind was six wards, each one being "in some sense, a complete town by itself."4 He specified a school building, one that could have multipurpose functions, for every ward. While he implicidy assumed that this organization would produce societal benefits, he made no direct references to the expected outcomes other than Diagram i, the "Three Magnets" (see fig. 5, above), which characterized towns in terms of "the isolation of crowds" and the country as having "no public spirit."5 By implication, the garden city addressed these problems. Finally, as Ebenezer Howard discussed the details of his plan, he offered an important caveat. Referring to Diagram 3, which represents a ward of his proposed town, he wrote that his sketch was "useful in following the description of the town itself—a description which is, however, merely suggestive, and will probably be much departedfrom"(see fig. 6, above).6 The key to understanding the past, present, and future applications of Howard's ideas lies in appreciating this point, accepting the Fishman-Schaffer distillation, and tracing subsequent experiments and their documentation of the natural evolution and development of To-morrow's essence. This last element, monitoring the maturing of a seminal concept, recognizes the importance of the legacy but also proposes that any idea or set of ideas, no matter how good, will change over time to meet current needs and conditions.

Five G e n e r a t i o n s of P l a n n i n g Since 1900, five generations of planners have drawn upon and adapted Howard's ideas in their residential schemes. Evidence of the adaptations lies in their plans, built projects, and writings. These planners experimented with Howard's design concepts—just as he envisioned they would—attempting to

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Perry, in his work for the Regional Plan Association, Neighborhood and Community Planning (1929), and in a later monograph, Housing for the Machine Age (1939), prescribed the contents and dimensions of the neighborhood unit (fig. 56), placing a school at its center. In his work, Perry drew not only on garden city principles but also on two other sources: the Chicago school of sociology and the efficiency movement represented by Taylorism.9 Perry believed that the neighborhood unit addressed modern problems ("the large city finds it difficult to re-create . .. that kind of face-to-face association which characterized the old village community") with modern solutions ("materials with which the planner of the city deals—streets, parks, boulevards, approaches, waterways, traffic terminals, zoning—all affect the local community").10 He argued that if cities caused anomie and dysfunctional relationships because of their size, density, and heterogeneity, then smaller, less dense, and homogenous urban cells could provide an environment that would heighten a feeling of belonging and contribute to a sense of community. Further, the rational arrangement of the infrastructure, especially the streets and open space, provided a physical framework for the desired human contacts. At the same time such arrangements were economically efficient, a point made earlier by British urban designers.11 Lewis Mumford, who became an ardent champion of the garden city, began in the 1920s a life-

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long campaign to publicize its principles. For example, he employed them as the theme of his script for The City, a film screened at the New York World's Fair (1939), and later as the central focus of several monographs, especially his encyclopedic, opinionated book The City in History (1961).12 The second generation, beginning in the United States in the New Deal period and culminating in England in the immediate postwar years, featured government endorsement of the garden city philosophy. The American Greenbelt Towns and the Tennessee Valley Authority settlements conformed to garden city specifications, as did, in a limited degree, the early public housing developments built under the authority of the Works Progress Administration and later the Public Works Administration. Writings confirming Howard's influence include Tracy Augur's testimonial to the most successfully designed TVA community, "The Planning of the Town of Norris"; the Federal Housing Administration's instructional manuals, such as Planning Neighborhoods for Small Houses (1939); and textbooks exemplified by Thomas Adams' Design ofResidential Areas (1934).13 In these plans, architects and planners contributed new interpretations of the first generation's adaptations. At Greenbelt, Maryland, for example, the designers overlaid the garden city with elements drawn from American experiments, especially Radburn. Hierarchical streets; separation of pedestrians and vehicles with footpaths, roads, and underpasses at their intersections; and superblocks containing housing surrounding interior parks were the hallmarks

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(%• 57)Following World War II, American governmental enthusiasm waned, but British public-sector support grew, leading to the adoption of the principles on the largest scale to date through the 1946 New Towns legislation, a law that would ultimately yield thirty-two settlements having a population of 2.5 million. For the most part, these towns would contain all the attributes designated in Tomorrow, including a form of the land tenure arrangements. As with American efforts, the planners and designers added new layers to the growing doctrine. At Stevenage, for example, the so-called Radburn idea became the model. The separation of different kinds of traffic, clustering of housing around open space, and the neighborhood unit became defining features. Participants and observers related the full story of these experiences in a broad literature. Clarence Stein, for example, working on these issues from the twenties to the sixties, offered a practitioner's analysis in his book Toward New Towns for America ^951), an account that is enriched by K. C. Parsons' article "Clarence Stein and the Greenbelt Towns: Settling for Less" and his carefully

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annotated edition, The Writings of Clarence S. Stein: Architect of the Planned Community.14 For the British experience, C. B. Purdom bore witness for fifty years starting with The Garden City (1913) and following on with Town Theory and Practice (1921), The Building ofSatellite Towns (1949), and The Letchworth Achievement (1963), while numerous scholars including Stephen V. Ward, The Garden City: Past, Present and Future (1992) and Dennis Hardy, From Garden Cities to New Towns (1991) and From New Towns to Green Politics (1991), have provided important nonparticipant studies.15

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American entrepreneurs Robert E. Simon and James W. Rouse represent the third generation. They brought the New Town ideas back to America from England through private market projects. Their communities, Reston, Virginia (t96r), and Columbia, Maryland (1963), built at the height of U.S. suburban expansion—the country's suburban population would surpass its city residents in 1970—would incorporate all that had been learned in the earlier eras including the Radburn idea and the neighborhood unit.

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A Figure 56. Clarence Perry applied his neighborhood unit concept to many settings, including low density suburban subdivisions (A) and more intensively setded urban areas (B); he employed a formula that placed a school at the center of a walkable community. Regional Plan Association.

Reston was to be "America's first full-scale satellite city" and was designed to

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be in conformity with the recommendations of the National Capital Regional Planning Commission's Year 2000 Plan. The concept for Reston's 6,800-acre site divided it into seven villages, each having a population of 10,000 housed at an average density of 11 people per acre. The villages surrounded a compact urban center located on the border of a lake. Clustered housing was the dominant feature, thus allowing for ample open space (fig. 58). Overall, residential use constituted 60 percent of the area, open space and recreation about 2 5 percent, commercial/industrial the remaining 15 percent. 16 Mortgage banker and shopping center developer James Rouse had similar plans for his much larger acquisition, a 14,000-acre plot in Howard County, Maryland, midway between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, which are only thirty-six miles apart. Advised by a large team of experts drawn from practice and academia, he agreed to build a settlement that represented the "best of town & country" as counseled by sociologist Herbert Gans, economist Chester Rapkin, traffic engineer Alan Voorhees, land use lawyer Charles Haar, and planner William Doebele.17 The resulting plan envisioned a population of 110,000 housed in seven villages, each having five to six neighborhoods with an elementary school at the core—pure Clarence Perry. Residential use constituted 50 percent of the land area, open space 25 percent, commercial/industrial 15 percent, and streets and roads 10 percent (fig. 59).18 Tl ill N I II, H I •>5>«v HI

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Figure 57. At Greenbelt, Maryland, architects blended British garden city elements with the American adaptations developed at Radburn, New Jersey. Clarence S. Stein Papers, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Kroch Library, Cornell University.

Simon's apd Rouse's key contributions were quasi-successful attempts to demonstrate the viability of garden city principles (especially its higher residential densities, mixed-use arrangements, and village/neighborhood organization) as an alternative to the commonly used suburban subdivision formulas, to merit respect from American lending institutions, and to gain the acceptance of the U.S. consumer. A generation later, an observer would report that Columbia, in particular, was "an early prototype for . . . modern community design."19 Here the literature is not so ample as in earlier generations, but worth noting are accounts by Martha E. Munzer and John Vogel Jr., New Towns: Building Cities from Scratch (1974); Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies, Reston: A Study in Beginnings (1966); and Robert Tennenbaum's reminiscences of life in Columbia, Maryland.20 The fourth generation, beginning in the late sixties and extending to the present, might be labeled the "condo developers." In their hands the most distilled, if not the most debased, version of the principles occurred. The replicated features were compactness, clustered units, transportation links, common open space, and sometimes a community facility. Any number of developments qual-

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the way in which people live. In addition to houses, people need employment, education and transportation. They need shops and stores and goods and services of every kind. They need medical and dental care, churches, libraries and hospitals., They need restau-' rants, theatres and entertainment. And beyond necessities, people. have a growing appetite for. all the opportunities that are offered m culture and recreation, for human fulfillment and satisfaction. Figure $g. The sales brochure for Columbia, Maryland, explicidy articulated the community's debt to garden city philosophy with its assertion that Columbia had "the best of town and country." The Rouse Company.

Jersey), Harmon Cove (Secaucus, New Jersey), Wyndham (Henrico Country, Virginia), Westminster Place (St. Louis, Missouri), and Society Hill (Newark, New Jersey). Although they represented the most minimal of garden city applications, they did demonstrate the tenacity (and marketability) of some of the ideas (fig. 60). Regrettably, in these developments the town and country link was not a marriage but a weak alliance, for most urban institutions were missing. There were no commercial and industrial activities—nearby cities, industrial parks, and shopping malls provided these. There were no public institutions—the neighboring regions supplied them. The residential area that in Howard's vision was nearly self-sufficient with regard to daily life was in this modern adaptation a parasite, dependent on others for survival.

Figure 58. Reston, Virginia, featured a town center sited near a lake with abutting cluster housing. Robert Simon. ified. They were called in the trade planned unit developments (PUDs) by planners who codified their qualities in municipal zoning ordinances. Found in every region, most examples were on vacant suburban land, but a few were on abandoned inner-city sites. They carried such names as Union Gap (Clinton, New

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Also in this period, the British New Towns program died a quick death. The nation's design professionals, who, like Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great

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cessive generations of professionals. Among them were Joseph DeChiara, TimeSaver Standards for Housing and Residential Development (1995), and David Listokin and Carole Walker's Subdivision and Site Plan Handbook (1989).23 In the 1980s, just when garden city ideas as a paradigm for town development seemed to reach their nadir in public and private experiments, they sprang forward again to underlie the work of the fifth generation of planners. This group operated under various identities, including New Urbanism, "Smart Growth," and "Sustainable Development." Together, these three vaguely related movements supported many elements originally articulated in To-morrow, thus bringing back to public consciousness the range of Howardian ideas. An analysis of their work provides insights about what might be expected in the future. A concise forecast includes the belief that communities will employ garden city principles in a variety of contexts, from urban and suburban to rural, and in many forms. These include new projects on vacant land, redevelopment of declining central cities, retrofitting old projects, creating standards for measuring the acceptability of proposed construction, and finding new financial instruments for garden city investment. Also present are the values of renewing a sense of community and environmental conservation.

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Figure 60. Harmon Cove, Secaucus, New Jersey. A planned unit development (PUD) represents the fourth generation of the application of garden city principles in the United States. In this iteration, the connections, though weak, do include such features as compact development linked with communal open spaces, expressed as parks and waterways. Author.

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American Cities (1961), viewed them as contributing to the decline of inner cities, withdrew their support. The Conservative Parry-dominated government, which saw them as too cosdy, mandated their privatization.21 This act changed the management and financial arrangements for New Towns but did not immediately affect the heavily built-out elements; thus physical evidence of the Howard influence on design remained. The literature on this era is vast and prescriptive. The American Planning Association published numerous handbooks, including Robert H. Freilich and Michael Shultz's Model Subdivision Regulations: Planning and Law (1995), specialized instructions through its technical arm, the Planning Advisory Service, and case studies in its monthly Planning Magazine.22 The Urban Land Institute produced similar material in its Project Reference File and its magazine, Urban Land. Urban design and site planning textbooks taught the techniques to suc-

In exploring the fifth generation, three questions arise: First, who have been the proponents of garden ideals during this period? Second, how have they expressed the concepts? Third, how have they implemented them? The Players In most reform movements, support comes from different sources, which unite around commonly perceived problems. Just as Ebenezer Howard's 1898 message gained credence among many because it offered practical solutions to his generation's major concern for relieving overcrowded, unpleasant urban conditions, so has it begun to perform a similar role in this era. The problems a century later were quite different, encapsulated in a shorthand diagnosis of urban sprawl and inner-city deterioration. (The New York City region is typical: between 1970 and 1990, the metropolitan region experienced a 61 % increase in the amount of developed land while its population grew by only 5%. Within the Big Apple's boundaries, several neighborhoods suffered property abandonment at a 50% rate and saw their population depleted by a comparable number. Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Detroit were also among those cities sharing similar fates.) In addition to difficult physical conditions, demographic data presented a grim portrait of racial and economic sepa-

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ration and isolation.24 For many, the garden city solution in its evolved forms promised to address many but not all parts of this situation. By far the most visible of the fifth generation were the self-declared advocates of New Urbanism, led primarily by architects, urban designers, and city planners and including sympathetic developers, politicians, and bankers. Identified with this group were architects Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Peter Calthorpe. They had a growing and enthusiastic following. Their forum was the Congress for the New Urbanism, founded in ^ 9 0 , which sponsored an annual conference, a quarterly newsletter, and a task force structure to foster its informational and promotional mission. Joining them as national players were members of the Smart Growth Network, a group organized by the U.S. Department of Environmental Protection in 1996 as an outgrowth of the work of the President's Council on Sustainable Development. Its mission, based on the simple principle "We believe cooperation within and among government, business and civic sectors is needed to redevelop existing communities and plan new communities that will more successfully serve the needs of those who live and work in them," allowed the neat fit of garden city ideals within its much broader agenda. Accordingly, Smart Growth publications—primarily a strong web page and an Urban Land Institute essay collection, Smart Growth (1998)—promoted aspects of the garden city.25 For example, the web page had extensive references to the work of the Congress for the New Urbanism, and the publication included an essay promoting dense, compact residential development.26 In addition, Smart Growth and its allied organizations, including the Urban Land Institute, sponsored conferences; the first, held in Baltimore in December 1997, was followed by a second in 1998 in Austin. The sessions gave ample exposure to the garden city principles.27 In the Sustainable Development arena, California's Local Government Commission was representative. An organization dominated by elected officials and city and county staff, it, along with its spin-off operation, the Center for Livable Communities, a technical assistance unit having a national constituency, was an active propagandist for the themes. Likewise, a great number of other nonprofit or professional groups endorsed the aspects of the garden city that were congruent with their respective missions. Representative were the New York-based Regional Plan Association, the U.S. Conference of Mayors' Joint Center for Sustainable Development, San Francisco Bay Region's Greenbelt Alliance, Chicago's Center for Neighborhood Technology, the American Planning Association, and the American Institute of Architects.

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In fact, the more distilled the Howardian ideal, the more numerous the supporters. For example, the Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land were attracted to the open space provisions. The National Trust for Historic Preservation's Main Street program identified with garden city interpretations related to inner-city commercial revitalization. Contemporary Expressions of Garden City Ideals The New Urbanists have promoted plans, projects, and writings that express the Howardian ideals more completely than any other group. The most familiar examples are Seaside, Florida (1981); Kendands, Gaithersburg, Maryland (1988); and Laguna West, Sacramento, California (1990). However, Celebration, Florida ^987), is the settlement that most closely resembles the original garden city, because it contains a complete town with residential, commercial, and industrial components. In addition, modern adaptations are plentiful. For example, Melrose Commons, New York (1994), demonstrates an inner-city application; Mashpee Commons, Massachusetts ^985), provides an example of retrofitting an existing facility; and Horizon West-Lakeside Village (1996) represents a model for large-scale rural land conversion. In 1998 the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) would lay claim to 201 neotraditional communities in 34 states—up from t37 in 29 places the previous year.28 Nonetheless, like their forebears the new communities are demonstrations, not the dominant mode for contemporary construction. Recendy the New Urban News reported that for 1996 only $r.i billion of a total of $1.5 trillion in U.S. development financing was dedicated to New Urbanist/garden city projects.29 All of these projects aspire to the major principles of New Urbanism. Drafted and modified over the years, they were ratified as the "Charter of New Urbanism" at the CNU IQO6 annual meeting. A summary of the charter reveals four basic beliefs: 1.

2.

All development should be in the form of compact, walkable neighborhoods or districts . . . [having] clearly defined centers and edges. The center should include a public space—such as a library, church or community center, a transit stop and retail business. Neighborhoods and districts should be compact (no more thanV4 mile from center to edge) and detailed to encourage pedestrian activity without excluding automobiles altogether. Streets should be laid out as an interconnected network (usually a grid or modified grid pattern) forming co-

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herent blocks where building entrances are from the street rather than parking lots. Public transit should connect neighborhoods to each other, and the surrounding region. A diverse mix of activities (residences, shops, schools, workplaces and parks, etc.) should occur in proximity. Also a wide spectrum of housing options should enable people of a broad range of incomes, ages, and family types to live within a single neighborhood/district. Civic buildings, such as government offices, churches and libraries, should be sited in prominent locations. Open spaces such as parks, playgrounds, squares and greenbelts should be provided in convenient locations throughout the neighborhood.30

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The tenets represent performance standards that direcdy relate to Howard's essential beliefs, but the tone is more doctrinaire: there is no mention of their being suggestive. In addition, they ignore Howard's holistic vision encompassing an entire, nearly self-sufficient, community. In reality, the principles show a relationship to the ward idea and clear bloodlines to Clarence Perry's program for the neighborhood unit, the criteria that fleshed out Howard's "ward" idea. Their rhetoric, as analyzed by David Schuyler in an incisive review for Urban History, is posited on the belief that using design to reassert the importance of the public realm will encourage a sense of community and enrich civic life.31

Figure 61. Although Celebration, Florida, includes many garden city ideas—greenbelt, a downtown, nearby employment, and mixed housing—it also blends New Urbanist design guidelines for residential development, including mandated front porches, sidewalks, and strategically placed open space. Author.

Having the New Urbanism principles as well as Howard's concepts in mind, an examination of four representative projects—Celebration, Melrose Commons, Mashpee Commons, and Horizons West-Lakeside Village—demonstrates specific models for the twenty-first century.

Improvement District, which controls the territory surrounding its Disney World holdings, negotiated its development with state and local authorities, and hired architects Robert A. M. Stern and Jacquelin Robertson to draw up a master plan for the 4,900-acre site that would become Celebration. The population target is 20,000, and the estimated cost of the town is about $2.5 billion (fig. 61).32

Celebration, Florida Celebration, located near Orlando, Florida, has two roots: Walt Disney's dream for an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (Epcot) and Disney Company president Michael Eisner's desire for corporate strength. Although Walt Disney had spoken publicly about building a community for the twentyfirst century, the Disney Company translated his ideas into the permanent World's Fair that now bears the name of Epcot. But the memory of Disney's wish to produce a residential community lingered beneath the company's consciousness for a couple of decades. By 1984 it emerged again as a justification for a new corporate strategy inspired by the determination that the company owned property in excess of its needs. Disney de-annexed 10,000 acres from the Reedy Creek

The resulting scheme has clear garden city roots. A4,7oo-acre greenbelt surrounds the area. An 18-acre mixed-use downtown, replete with retail, civic, open space, public facility, and residential uses, dominates the center. Adjacent is a 36acre educational complex for grades K-12, and adding to the economic base are a 109-acre office park with potential for a million square feet of commercial space and a 60-acre health campus. The latter two elements have buffered sites separated from the residential neighborhoods by highway and greenbelt connections. Housing is available at several price levels, with expected incomes starting at about $22,000 for apartments and rising steadily higher for town houses and single-family units. Ample and varied open spaces are integrated in

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the golf course, neighborhood parks, playing fields, and informal and formal promenades as well as in a unique land-banking arrangement crafted by Disney and government officials.33 A dramatic natural feature—a man-made lake formed by creative drainage—is fed by a wide canal that forms the central axis in the town. Residents have pedestrian access to most facilities and automobile links to the region's interstate and state highway systems.34 Although the current residents number fewer than 4,500, if consumer demand prevails, Celebration should reach its population target in about a decade or more. Growth occurring at about 400 units per year has resulted in a community of 2,200 dwelling units with about 1,000 apartments. One observer related, "Some 5,000 homebuyers entered a lottery for the privilege of purchasing the first 350 homes." And its real estate is selling faster than other comparables in the area.35 Built into Celebration is a belief in architectural details suggested in Ebenezer Howard's vision and more clearly embodied in the interpreters' work. Like Unwin and Stein, who designed nostalgic residences sometimes having Elizabethan or cottage-style attributes, Celebration's sponsors insist that the dwellings conform to the Celebration Pattern Book.36 While styles vary from Southern Plantation to English Regency, each has specifications designed to support a sense of community. Whereas Stein limited lot sizes and oriented his dwellings away from the street toward a common open space having interior pedestrian walkways separate from the hierarchically arranged vehicular routes, Stern and Robertson employ tree-bordered, sidewalk-lined streets laid out in a grid pattern, front porches, backyard parking, and alleys to reconstruct a green, urban at mosphere. The latter effort helps realize Howard's desire to marry town and country. Melrose Commons, Bronx, New York While Howard envisioned the garden city as a means to address population congestion, fifth-generation planners are now proposing its use to solve innercity land planning issues. At least two scenarios emerge. The first is the reconstruction of heavily abandoned neighborhoods under the almost exhausted urban renewal process or the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD's) $200 million Homeownership Zone grant program, often aided by support from the Fannie Mae Foundation.37 The second is the reconceptualization and redesign of public housing under HUD's $3.7 billion Hope VI program, which currendy has projects in thirty-two states. Centennial Place,

Five Generations of the Garden City the former Techwood Homes in Adanta, Georgia, is exemplary.38 Melrose Commons, a Bronx, New York, project, is another fine illustration of this work. Dealing with a thirty-block urban renewal site in one of the most economically and physically deteriorated neighborhoods in New York City, the plan for Melrose Commons evolved during the early nineties. It is a substantial revision of a plan issued in 1989, emerging after local political rejection of the earlier scheme, which had been developed by the city's Departments of City Planning and Housing Preservation and Development.39 Responsible for the turnaround were community activists representing the area's 900 residents, who attacked the first proposal for its heavy displacement and emphasis on middle-income housing. They organized a planning group, Nos Quedamos (We stay), secured technical assistance from a coalition of advocate planners from Columbia University, Hunter College, and Pratt Institute, and engaged in a multiyear exercise that involved the city's agencies, the Office of the Bronx Borough President, and the Urban Assembly, a Manhattan-based coalition of civic organization leadT ers.40 The outcome is a scheme that calls for a compact, diverse neighborhood containing 1,700 new dwelling units and other attendant features: a main street, community open space linked to a school, and a town center hosting local cultural, civic, and educational functions. Elements also include maintenance of the grid street system and provision of social services and employment opportunities to enhance the residents' level of self-sufficiency.41 Inclusive participatory planning is a feature unimagined by Howard and the succeeding generations. Nonetheless, it is now an intrinsic part of the process and clearly compatible with the propagation of garden city principles. In addition, the public has much to contribute to the ultimate schemes. At Melrose Common, members of Nos Quedamos articulated their goals and objectives, later testing the new plan against them. One example illustrates the result. The 1989 plan included a 4-acre "central park," a feature current residents feared would become a magnet for drug dealers and addicts. A reworked plan scaled down the large park to three smaller areas and other designated open space whose siting accorded with the community's explicit goals: "Large spaces need to be visible from the sidewalk, across their length and width. And located so that pedestrian traffic and building development provide an 'eyes on' environment. Where possible, these spaces should be related to existing and planned institutional use, such as schools and health care centers, and programmed for community uses. . . . Small spaces, developed as children's playgrounds, should

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occur in mid-block locations and be formed by the residential buildings with windows oriented toward them." 42 As of spring 2001, implementation of the plan was ongoing. By October 2000, 35 three-family town houses in the Plaza de Los Angeles opened to great acclaim, and work had started on La Puerta de la Vrtalidad, a 61-unit apartment building.43 Mashpee Commons, Cape Cod, Massachusetts &',* Mashpee Commons, located on a 170-acre site at a critical intersection of two state roads in rapidly developing Cape Cod, is a mixed-use project with an Andres Duany-Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) master plan (1987). The commercial and civic elements occupying about 25-30 acres are building out slowly but smoothly; the housing piece is only now beginning to materialize after an eleven-year struggle to gain regulatory approvals and popular acceptance. The developers have completed multiple permitting phases and are currently undertaking a fifteen-year final master plan-development agreement approval to cover future growth.

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Figure 62. At Mashpee Commons, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a retrofitted shopping center is the core of a new garden city-type community planned by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Author.

Originally built in 1962 as the New Seabury Shopping Center, the strip mall was a standard, somewhat dismal, 75,000-square-foot suburban retail development on a 92-acre site that by the mid-eighties was hurt by competition from newer, nearby facilities. In addition, it was a remarkably unattractive landmark in an area surrounded by New England villages whose charm was threatened by advancing suburbanization.44

As part of the first permitting process, the developers made some concessions intended, in part, to fulfill garden city principles. To date, they have set aside 1.5 acres of land for a town green, donated 2 adjacent acres for a public library and a parcel for a large performing arts center, contributed a sewage treatment plant, and agreed to build and maintain the roads and sidewalks within the commercial areas. Also, conforming to their desire to create a sense of place, they sold 8 acres for construction of a substantial church complex.

Over time, the owners, Mashpee Commons Limited Partnership, assembled additional acreage around the center. Their plans expanded upon the DPZ master plan for four neighborhoods and are in conformity with the town's comprehensive plan and the Cape Cod Commission's Regional Policy Plan (1991). The expected use allocation is 380 dwelling units (38% single family, 54% apartments, and 8% town houses), 140 hotel rooms, and an additional 425,000 square feet of commercial space (51% retail, 38% office, and 11% restaurant) (fig. 62).

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In the summer of 1998, Mashpee Commons L.P. initiated a second permitting process with local, regional, and state authorities. In 1999 the developers secured approval for zoning ordinance amendments; the following year they pursued the next stage of environmental reviews and regional planning commission approvals to accommodate the garden city principles embodied in the master plan. Of note is the petition to use transfer of development rights (TDRs) and zoning overlays to achieve the preservation of open space and the creation of fine-grained commercial development. Employing an existing TDR law, they are seeking permission for a straightforward exchange for residential units on a

To date the developers have doubled the original amount of commercial activity and in 1998 opened the first units of housing, 13 second-story apartments over a new retail block. Leases cover 86 shops, including 2 supermarkets, 5 banks, the Cape's first Starbucks, and 8 restaurants. To attract population and sustain their claim that Mashpee is an "arts and culture center," management provides venues for such entertainment as music festivals, art shows, and special holiday attractions.45

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52-acre open space. In addition, they are calling for a new schedule of lot sizes and setbacks on all phases of the project to achieve their desired "New Englandstyle village development."46 The Mashpee Commons story demonstrates two important lessons for twentyfirst-century development. First, as a project undertaken by a relatively small private-sector developer, which is more the norm than is the Celebration example, financing arrangements are extremely important in dictating the pace of construction. Second, although the process of building according to garden city principles is long and complicated in the United States, it can be accomplished through intelligent planning. The developers are solving the cash flow issues that hinder similar developments by securing the profitability of the commercial space before embarking on the amenity-filled, high infrastructure-cost neighborhood construction. After they had developed a master plan and had permission for up to 100 units in a mixed-use layout, eleven years elapsed before they offered the first residences. The fiscal buffering offered by the income generated from commercial use has provided "breathing space" for the developers and the community to negotiate the legal accommodations necessary for planting a garden city in a conservative community. Building sufficient trust to secure appropriate zoning amendments and ironing out the details for development permissions has taken a long time. While the negotiations have been occurring, Mashpee Commons, by its very presence, is serving as a marketing tool. As visitors come to shop, eat, or attend various entertainment functions, they witness the benefits of a pedestrian oriented downtown having high aesthetic standards, an attractive park, lively spaces for congenial dining, groups of park benches for people-watching or nibbling an ice cream cone, and a general level of excitement and activity not found in nearby shopping areas. Their pleasant experiences should translate into greater acceptance of the project's neotraditional neighborhoods when they become available. Horizon West-Lakeside Village, Florida To deal with one of the nation's most compelling issues, urban sprawl, several states, including Florida, Oregon, Maine, and New Jersey, have responded with growth management legislation aimed at regulating urban, suburban, and rural land use and the timing of its development. Orange County, Florida, one of the nation's fastest-growing areas—from 1970 to 1990 its population increased by more than 330,000—added an innovative chapter to these efforts with its recent work with Horizon West, Inc., a coalition of orange-grove farmers and other property owners. The result is the 1995 amendment to the county's Compre-

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hensive Policy Plan that uses garden city principles to reconcile state growth management mandates with local landowner interests. This innovation, entided the "Village Land Use Classification," aims to promote compact, dense, affordable, mixed-use development that employs ample open space to define boundaries and urban form as well as to provide recreation. The specifications for a village are as follows: "Each Village will consist of two to four neighborhoods surrounding a Village Center. The concept utilizes the neighborhood as a building block to achieve growth in a complete, compact and integrated urban form. The neighborhoods will contain a variety of housing types and a neighborhood school site.... Development within any Village will be initiated by a Specific Area Plan (SAP)."47 To foster an understanding of the new provision, the County Planning Department developed a master plan for 38,000 acres of former and current citrus groves in the southwestern section of the county, oudining eight villages, each bounded by a rural edge or undeveloped land (fig. 63). Next, it developed an SAP for Lakeside Village, a prototype. Covering roughly 5,100 acres adjacent to Disney's Reedy Creek Improvement District and including more than 2,000 acres of lakes and wedands, the plan calls for 10,400 units of housing to be built in three 500-acre neighborhoods, each having a central focal point such as a school, neighborhood park or green, and up to 20,000 square feet of commercial use. Net housing densities are set at 5 units per acre. The neighborhoods are built around a 60-acre village center. The plan suggests the following distribution: 28 percent with 12 units per acre, 44 percent with 6 units per acre, and 32 percent with 3 units per acre. All residences are to be no more than a half mile from a neighborhood school and one mile from the village center. An integrated street pattern with sidewalks and bike paths connects the neighborhoods. Blocks should be at least 240 feet in width and 300 to 1,000 feet in length (depending on lot size) and include alleys for garage spaces.48 Open space laces existing nearby acreage with the new elements. Site plans must set aside land for public facilities in a ratio of 1 acre per 6.5 acres of developable land (fig. 64). Included in the SAP documents is a Village Development Code Ordinance containing subdivision regulations and design guidelines. Its purpose is to "promote the development of neighborhoods, villages and community centers that reflect the characteristics of a traditional southern town." 49 The ordinance incorporates the neotraditional elements, including facade treatment, narrow streets, signage, and landscaping, that are now associated with contemporary adoption of garden city principles. Like Mashpee Commons, the plan employs the transfer of development rights

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to achieve open space and environmental objectives. The greenbelts or buffers around villages, aquifer recharge areas, and wildlife connections wedands are authorized places whose development rights under current zoning may be transferred to other nearby areas. In May 1997 the county approved the Lakeside Village SAP. In accordance with the plan, school sites are dedicated, and the Reedy Creek Improvement District has agreed to provide the utilities. A second village is on the drawing boards.50 These four examples demonstrate that building what has evolved as the twentieth-century prototype garden city requires patience, foresight, imagination, and relatively deep pockets on the part of developers. It demands flexibility, courage, and political will on the part of localities. Both must reach accommodations that will satisfy the political, economic, and legal constraints of the American system. While new community forms do not dominate the landscape, they have received a remarkable amount of popular and professional attention, ranging from cover articles in Newsweek and the New York Times Magazine to rewrites of architectural standards in such classic texts as Harold R. Sleeper and Charles G. Ramsey's Architectural Graphic Standards.51 At one end of the visual representation of the fifth generation's work is a recent Hollywood movie, The Truman Show, that used Seaside as its setting in a story purported to portray a Utopian life for its protagonist; at the other are such publications as the three-volume Traditional Neighborhood Design Series, described by one reviewer as "the most thorough and genuine response to the need for traditional home configurations . . . [that] shows characteristic neighborhood locations and lot building arrangements"—something surprisingly rare for plan books.52 Implementation

Experiments

In addition to the cases mentioned above, which employ creative financing or development phasing, transfer of development rights, and model ordinances to achieve their aims, garden city advocates and others are experimenting with a number of implementation devices. Among them are project review/approval

Figure 63. Horizon West, a coalition of orange-grove owners, worked with county planners to develop a master plan for 38,000 acres in fast-growing Orange County, Florida, that calls for eight villages bounded by greenbelts. Miller, Sellen, Conner, and Walsh, Community Planners, Designers, Engineers, and Economists.

T Five Generations of the Garden City by influential lobbying groups, development of new mortgage products, coordination of local land use regulations in a single conservation system, and focused state infrastructure finance. Although these innovations are still in their seminal stages, they may become powerful agents in promoting Howard's principles. The Greenbelt Alliance, founded in 1958 as a environmental advocacy group in the San Francisco Bay area, has devised an approval scheme, entided the "Compact Development Endorsement Program," to support projects that meet five criteria related to location, automobile dependency, mixed-use development, density, and size. Those that qualify receive a letter of support or the organization's active lobbying at public hearings and other forums, or both. The desired characteristics include construction within an urban area, siting within a half mile of a transit stop or job center, and minimum density of twenty units per acre. These specifications clearly encourage the application of garden city principles.53 In the financing arena, leaders of three organizations, the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP), have created the Location Efficient Mortgage (LEM) Partnership to promote home-purchase loans that take into account cost savings incurred by people living in densely populated places served by mass transit. Under this program (which the group hopes to test in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles), mortgage lenders reduce borrowers' cost burdens significandy, or, conversely, borrowers qualify for larger loans than they could get under customary lending practices because the bankers adjust their formulas to recognize the borrowers' lower transportation expenses.54

ADEQUATE PUBLIC FACILITIES & GREENBELTS LEGEND HtiiO—• lM Lakeside Village Horizon West Vilage Land Use Classification Area l l III . Miler - Seflen Associates, IIK. M t un PW tl w i i X (w i ntMn f(rt-k*.,flnrtl.U»l Orange County Planning Department

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Figure 64. Horizon West-Lakeside Village, Orange County, Florida, the first of the proposed developments, employs the neighborhood unit and introduces transfer of development rights tofinanceopen space in and around the community. Miller, Sellen, Conner, and Walsh, Community Planners, Designers, Engineers, and Economists.

The third device, coordinating a locality's land use apparatus to protect conservation areas, has been employed in one at least one place, a Pennsylvania township where over the years it has been able to protect 500 acres. The system calls for mapping conservation area inventories, usually found as part of a comprehensive plan, and overlaying revised zoning and subdivision codes. The suggested zoning calls for authorizing a range of densities and offering incentives for compact or village type development. The subdivision regulation idea specifies a modified site planning procedure, asking the developer to provide a sketch plan oudining proposed conservation areas and then calling for the lot line and street maps.55 Maryland represents the use of focused state infrastructure spending. In 1997

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the legislature, urged by Governor Parris Glendening, passed the Neighborhood Conservation and Smart Growth Initiative, which took effect in October 1998. Under this law, the state, which spends about $1.6 billion of its $15 billion budget on infrastructure (roads, sewers, and schools), will withhold or limit these funds for places outside of designated "smart growth areas." Recipients favored for funding will be municipalities, land inside the Baltimore and Washington Beltways, and counties whose projects meet specific density standards.56

Some International Implications This paper has focused on the Anglo-American experience, but notice of the application of garden city principles elsewhere is necessary when considering their relevance for the twenty-first century. Around the world, from France to Singapore, there are many examples of the complete transfer of garden city ideas as satellite cities developed under government sponsorship. In these instances, the countries have employed the concepts to handle congested inner cities as originally envisioned by Ebenezer Howard. At Marne la Vallee, one of several new towns planned by the French in the seventies to capture Parisian population growth, the principles are present: compact housing, mixed-use town centers, and plenty of green. \i HI

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Another example, Tampines (Singapore), an 824-acre town built on predominandy state owned land with a population of approximately 180,000, also shows the Howard influence. Residential use dominates at 32 percent of the land area, and when completed the town will have 84,500 units (at present there are 64,500) of mixed density, with almost 90 percent high density dwellings. A city center, connected to downtown Singapore by rapid transit, is well on its way to completion, and each of the city's seven residential neighborhoods has a town center (fig. 65). Eight percent of the land area is designated for office/industrial parks, and another 8 percent for institutions, including a university. Recreational and open space constitute 22 percent of the total. Clearly this town (and others like it) is built at a density well beyond To-morrow's prescriptions and the greenbelt acreage is far below the specifications. Nonetheless, it achieves some of Howard's goals. Because Asian cities are expected to be the major sources of urban growth in the twenty-first century, the Singapore solution may pave the way for other countries.57

Figure 65. At Singapore's award-winning Tampines New Town, planners have adapted garden city principles to meet the needs of a populous, land-scarce country by dramatically increasing residential density and reducing open space, nonetheless operating in the spirit of Ebenezer Howard. Author.

Conclusion In the one hundred years since the publication of To-morrow,fivegenerations of planners have translated Ebenezer Howard's basic concepts into a series of plans, a process of modification he fully anticipated. They have expressed their adaptations in many activities, including private and public efforts to replicate the complete garden city or to adopt parts that meet social, economic, and political acceptance. They have been apologists for their projects in books, articles, and film. They have established codes and specifications in "how-to" manuals that have had broad circulation. One of the most enduring interpretations has been Clarence Perry's neighborhood unit. It is now reappearing under a new name, the neotraditional neighborhood espoused by a group of architects, planners, and others who have labeled their movement New Urbanism. Also noteworthy has been the growing sophistication of the implementation devices designed to achieve garden city

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aims in the late twentieth century. At least seven types or techniques are now in use. They include refashioning zoning; utilizing transfer of development rights; joining conservation, environmental planning, and urban design, including landbanking; developing by phasing to ensure cash flow and market acceptance; testing new mortgage criteria; employing political strength and allying with movements having large constituencies and similar missions; and practicing participatory planning.

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In this reflection of the applications and the longevity of the garden city ideas, three features stand out: their variety, their flexibility, and their persistence. Once conceived to deal with inner-city congestion, they are now also treating some symptoms of inner-city deterioration and urban sprawl. In some instances, as in Celebration, the fullest form of the concept is present. In others, only fragments remain. Based on this history, however, it is safe to predict that over the course of the twenty-first century, garden city ideas, distilled to their essence, will continue to be present—adapted to local needs and fashioned to meet contemporary problems. Although they probably will not be the dominant form of development, they will be at the forefront of advanced town planning and urban design. Ebenezer Howard can rest peacefully in the knowledge that To-morrow did indeed create at least one path to real reform. His work inspired efforts to create better housing and communities throughout the world.

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If Ebenezer Howard were alive today to view the current state and future prospects of cities, there would be much that he would find familiar. The dynamic, and in most cases unbridled, growth of cities worldwide and their continuing dysfunctional relationship with nature would present itself to him as an old nemesis, a Moriarty grown now to vast proportion. At the time Howard penned To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, he had watched industrial England give rise to an urban population that boasted four cities with populations of more than i million residents and more than one hundred cities with 100,000 or more. The effect of this urban migration upon Howard was so immense that it prompted him to dedicate his life to the reform of its excesses. Exposed to the degradation of human health and dignity that the crush of urbanization brought upon both the city and the rural populations, Howard set for himself the task of envisioning a new city where such problems could be relegated to ancient memory. "I determined," he stated, "to take such part, however small it might be, in helping a new civilization come into being."1 Given the profundity of Howard's reaction to conditions a century ago, how much deeper would his commitment be if he could look out across the global

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landscape today and see a world in which more than four hundred cities are home to a million or more inhabitants, where megacities of 15 million or more are not uncommon. At the dawn of the new millennium, 90 percent of Europe's population, 80 percent of North America, 75 percent of Latin America, and approximately 40 percent of Africa and Asia are urban dwellers who share, to a greater or lesser extent, a similarly dysfunctional relationship between "civilization" and the natural world from which it springs.

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Although not an environmentalist by today's standards, Howard comprehended the fundamental relationship between nature and society. Nature, Howard understood—although, following the terminology of the day, he referred to it as "country"—was the underpinning of anything society might create. He saw it as "the symbol of God's love and care for man."2 Its fundamental role was clear: "All that we are and all that we have comes from it. Our bodies are formed of it: to it they return. We are fed by it, clothed by it, and by it we are warmed and sheltered. On its bosom we rest. Its beauty is the inspiration of art, of music, of poetry. Its force propels all the wheels of industry. It is the source of all health, all wealth, all knowledge."3 Yet Howard knew that the relationship between the modern urban-industrial society and "kindly mother earth, at once the source of life, of happiness, of wealth and power,"4 was one of antagonism and destruction. He believed that the resolution of this conflict offered an opportunity to reconstitute society on a higher plane. Because of the absence of such resolution, nature's "fullness of joy and wisdom" had not yet become apparent to most individuals and would not do so, he realized, so long as "this unholy, unnatural separation of society and nature endures."5 Once again, how much deeper would his commitment to his life's project be if he could see the extent to which the divergence of society and nature had increased in recent years. In his own day, Howard had recoiled from the filth of the crowded alleys, the coal-blackened skies, and the rivers choked with refuse in cities such as London and Manchester. Today he would find some of these issues partially addressed, only to learn that the "unnatural separation" had taken on deeper and far more threatening dimensions. Although in some modern industrial societies, problems such as air pollution have been partially ameliorated, the planet's atmosphere may now be suffering the greatest impact yet. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, certain types of air pollutants are producing long-term and perhaps irreversible changes to the global atmosphere. Among these are two processes that threaten the earth's very life cycles: the destruction of the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect. The ozone layer,

Green Cities and the Urban Future a thin shield of gases that protects the earth's surface from much of the ultraviolet (UV) radiation generated by the sun, is a critical part of the earth's protective mande. Ozone destruction caused by industrial pollution and transportation is allowing increased amounts of UV radiation to reach the earth's surface. Over the next forty years, researchers anticipate an increase in UV radiation at the earth's surface of 5 to 40 percent.6 The result will be rising numbers of cases of skin cancer, cataracts, and immune deficiencies in the human population. Within the planet's ecosystems, reduced crop yields and declining populations offish, larvae, zooplankton, and phytoplankton are expected. As the ozone layer is thinning, carbon dioxide concentrations in the troposphere are increasing. This greenhouse effect, caused by the burning of fossil fuel, was first predicted by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1896, two years before the publication of-Ebenezer Howard's book. Unfortunately, Arrhenius has proved to be better than Howard in forecasting the world's environmental future. The United Nations Environmental Program and independent scientists estimate that a 60 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will be required to maintain atmospheric levels at current concentrations.7 Barring such an effort, some scientists predict that by the end of the twenty-first century, the earth's average temperature could rise more than six degrees, making the planet warmer than it has been in 40 million years.8 The resulting rapid shift in climactic zones could outstrip the ability of the plant and animal communities to adapt or migrate. This, coupled with the predicted rise in sea levels caused by global warming, could bring severe disruption to coastal cities as well as the habitats and life support systems of myriad species on earth. The planet's species are already suffering heavy losses due to the destruction of habitat. Rain forests, which cover 7 percent of the planet's surface but harbor close to half of the earth's species, have experienced a fate similar to that of the atmosphere. To date, one-third of the world's original rain forests have been eliminated and it is estimated that we are losing approximately 55 million additional acres annually as the land is cleared for timber harvests and agriculture.9 The world's seas are also the cradle of much of the planet's biodiversity. They are more productive than the much discussed habitats of wedand estuaries or salt marshes. Coral reefs, sea grass beds, and salt tolerant mangrove forests are home to more than 1 million species. Coral reefs, often described as the "rain forests of the ocean," are the breeding nursery and feeding ground of a vast number of these species. Industrial pollution has damaged many of the planet's reefs, killing up to 75 percent of the existing reefs off the coast of some countries. Salt toler-

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ant mangrove forests provide spawning and feeding grounds for a rich variety of species and are perhaps more essential to the ocean's productivity than coral reefs, yet they are rapidly being eliminated by the oil and pulp industries. For example, over half of India's, more than one-third of Ecuador's, and most of the Philippines' mangrove forests will have been destroyed. Soil degradation and desertification, too, have reached global proportions. The United Nations' Environmental Program estimates that 35 percent of the earth's land surface is threatened by desertification. The U.N. has calculated that since the end of World War II, n percent of the earth's plant-supporting soils have been damaged enough that their ability to sustain vegetative life has been at least partially destroyed. Worldwide, nearly 40 percent of the earth's total farmland has been degraded in some fashion by overgrazing and poor agricultural practices.10 In addition, the productivity of one-third of the world's cropland has been damaged by the loss of topsoil. Each year, through wind and water erosion, approximately 24 billion tons of this productive layer of the earth's surface are lost.11

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Obviously, these and other statistics undermine Ebenezer Howard's premise, so central to Garden Cities of To-morrow, that the earth was the "one form of material wealth which is most permanent and abiding" and which transcended the "value and utility of which our most wonderful inventions can never detract." True to the optimism of a reformer, Howard's faith in the mission and direction of existence was unquestioned: "Those of us who believe that there is a grand purpose behind nature cannot believe that the career of this planet is likely to be speedily cut short now that better hopes are rising in the hearts of men, and that, having learned a few of its less obscure secrets, they are finding their way, through much toil and pain, to a more noble use of its infinite treasures. The earth for all practical purposes may be regarded as abiding forever."12 Given his proclivities for both the statistical and the romantic, and his understanding of the deep relationship of dependency and cause and effect between nature and the human presence, between the countryside and the city, it is not difficult to postulate that Howard would have grasped the ecological urgency of the current era and joined with the leading voices of today's environmental movement. Among these voices Howard would find much with which he would agree and which would resonate with his beliefs. In addition, he would find innovations that would appeal to his nature as both an inventor and a social romantic. Finally, were he able to return to participate in current discussions about the fate of nature and the city, given that his ideas were published more than a century ago, he would find much that is both deeply disturbing and disappointing.

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Howard was, above all, an idealist dedicated to progressive social reform. He was also an urbanist, a man who, despite his sharp critique of the cities in his day and love of the English countryside, was no Arcadian romantic. Deeply moved by the strife he saw, Howard nevertheless recognized that a reformed and in some ways radically reconfigured urban arena offered the best hope for resolving civilization's conflicts. In this context, then, Howard would find much of the "green" or "sustainability" movements familiar. Despite the potentially radical implications of their doctrines, these new movements, like Howard, operate clearly within the confines of the traditions of reform. Also, unlike their "back to the land" cousins of the 1960s, these movements address rural concerns but largely see the configuration and operation of the urban form as the keystone to solving the current crisis. Perhaps the strongest similarity between the movements of today and Howard's work is the central theme that the solution to the social, question lies in joining nature and society to create a more harmonious and just community. Howard saw the need for this synergy: "[N] either the town magnet nor the country magnet represents the full plan and purpose of nature," he conceded. "Human society and the beauty of nature are meant to be enjoyed together. The two magnets must be one. As man and woman by their varied gifts and faculties supplement each other, so should town and country." The end of this rivalry would reduce the antagonisms that drive society apart and create new opportunities for social advancement. "Town and country must be married," Howard declared, "and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization "13 The exuberant, romantic exultation of Howard is echoed in the often bureaucratic jargon of the sustainability movement. In the report Cities and Counties: Thinking Globally, Acting Locally, Public Technologies, Inc.—a nonprofit subsidiary of the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties, and the International City/County Management Association—offers the thin rallying cry that "the conventional view of competition between economic growth and environmental quality must be changed through public policy, management and investment practices. To maintain the critical balance between a healthy economy and a healthy environment, economic growth and environmental quality must be treated as complementary objectives. This balanced perspective is essential to 'sustain' our communities."14 The United Nations joins this plea with an international perspective, urging that cities strive to "reconcile the often-competing demands of economic growth and environmental protec-

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tion." While conceding the difficulties in managing economic development and environmental objectives, the U.N. has called upon cities to "harness the energy and creativity of their citizens and build upon the inherent advantages that urbanism provides." A successful urbanistic agenda will be "part of the solution to the global problems of poverty and environmental degradation."15 The Planet Drum Foundation, an avant-garde, grassroots, environmental nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, puts it more plainly. "There needs to be a profound shift in the fundamental premises and activities of city living." To accomplish this, cities must become "green" and be "transformed into places that are fife enhancing and regenerative."16 At the core of these declarations, both by Howard and by the present-day sustainable and green city advocates, is an acknowledgment of the essential role that nature plays in contributing to the basis of all wealth. The Sustainable Communities Initiative of the City of Austin, for example, is predicated on the belief that "economic development must be viewed in the context of the supporting environmental parameters, or carrying capacity, of the region."17 Both Howard and today's reformers also believe they have, as a starting point, a consensus that their issue is of primary urgency. In contemplating the crisis of urban overcrowding and its complaints, Howard opened Garden Cities of To-morrow with the observation that the continuing growth of "already overcrowded cities" was harmful to the nation. This was the one issue of national importance upon which all thoughtful individuals could agree.' 8 In parallel fashion, many of today's sustainability advocates appropriate for themselves a mande of consensus. "We are neither Right or Left, but in front," declared the famous slogan of the German Green party. In the northwestern United States, a project entided Sustainable Seatde presents its work as "the product of creative community dialogue about our common future." Those who contributed to its development "share a similar motivation and concern: ensuring that the community we pass on to our descendants will be healthy, vital and fulfilling." The goals chosen by Sustainable Seatde are reported to "reflect collective values and inform collective decisions."19 Public Technologies, Inc., like Howard, makes the claim of global consensus: "[T]he United States—and the rest of the world—is discovering that our unfettered consumption of the earth's natural resources and non-renewable energy sources to support economic growth polluted our air, water and land, visibly damaging our environment." Both parties, past and present, argue that the urgency of their crisis is self-evident and that responsibility for its cause is mutu-

Green Cities and the Urban Future207 ally shared. The overcrowding of cities and depletion of the countryside is "deeply deplored" by all—just as it is "our" (both Exxon Mobil Corporation's and the man on the street's) "unfettered consumption of the earth's natural resources" that has caused the current environmental crisis.20 This assumption of consensus has a political dimension as well. Although Howard conceded wide differences over how best to solve the social question of his time, he was certain that the garden city represented "a path along which sooner or later, both the Individualist and the Socialist must inevitably travel." While he drew upon arguments made by individuals from a broad spectrum of political opinion, Howard believed that the garden city was so obviously a pragmatic and practical solution to contemporary social problems that individuals from diverse backgrounds would unite behind it. What Howard called a "thread of practicability" is shared by the sustainability advocates and enables them, at least initially, to lay claim to the absence of polarization around their issues.21 These positions include presenting their arguments in terms of visions of the future rather than addressing, in any detailed fashion, the causes and concerns of the immediate crisis. In addition, they base their solutions largely on improving managerial ethics and efficiency, claim to be "pro-growth" and generally supportive of technological advancements and free market solutions, and include in their objectives equitable access to the development process and its rewards. In opening his argument for the establishment of garden cities, Howard gave his readers not a sustained analysis of current conditions but a vision of a better way of life. He commenced the first chapter of To-morrow with the phrase, "the reader is asked to imagine . . . " The following pages present a description and layout of this future garden city. Howard's depiction of the garden city is quite detailed and includes two diagrams of the city and its environs as well as specific neighborhood configurations. Although observing that these are "diagrams only" and that the "plan must depend upon site selected," Howard details the width of streets, the location of boulevards, and the placement of important public buildings.22 Sustainability and green city advocates often deploy a similar strategy in reaching for consensus on their proposals. By describing a new community in the future, "born full grown, from the forehead of Zeus," they are able to abstract away from uncomfortable—and often necessary—questions as to the original causes of the problem and obstacles to its solution. For example, in 1998 the New Jersey Office of State Planning published a booklet explaining the state's Development and Redevelopment Plan. Entided Communities of Place, it

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contained a series of computer graphics that transformed blighted urban streets in a current New Jersey city into cityscapes that might be found in some future "sustainable" city. Similarly, participants in Sustainable Seatde's "Visioning Exercise" considered the following point of departure for their discussion: One generationfromnow, in the year 2020, what evidence would you hope to find here in the Puget Sound, that indicates our long term health and vitality—cultural, economic, environmental, and social? What is it that communicates that we have become a sustainable society?... a community, government, organization, agency, neighborhood needs a vision of where it wants to go. A vision allows a community to look into the future, to creatively think about what it could become. It can offer a framework for understanding community concerns, prioritizing issues, and measuring progress.23 11' in r:

For Sustainable Seatde, it is "visioning" rather than historical experience that provides the framework for "understanding concerns" and "prioritizing issues." Peter Berg's Green City Programfor San Francisco Bay Area Cities and Towns begins with a story of a workshop in which participants are sent on a brief "vision quest" within one of the city's parks and asked to "think about how you are connected to the native plants and animals, watersheds, landforms, climate, and other natural features of the Northern California bioregion."24 At a series of Green City meetings, held in 1986 by Berg's Planet Drum Foundation, "groups and individuals from specific fields of interest... were asked to contribute suggestions and visions."25 The result is reflected in the subsequent Green City Program, which ends each chapter devoted to issues such as recycling, transportation, and urban habitat with a "fable" that envisions the operative green city in a neighborhood, day-to-day setting. Whereas Howard and the green city and sustainability advocates demonstrate little reliance upon history as a guide, they place significant emphasis on improved managerial systems as the means of solving present crises. More than half the chapters of Garden Cities of To-morrow are devoted to the raising, expenditure, and administration of revenues within the garden city. Repeatedly Howard argues in favor of the garden city on the basis of its greater efficiency in the realm of public finance and economics.26 In like manner, today's urban environmental reformers place great store in the economic superiority of the principles upon which they found their proposals. The Governor's Commission for a Sustainable South Florida justifies its plan for "Revitalizing Southeast Florida's Urban Core" with the argument that "[t]he cost of inefficient, sprawling development

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has an impact on all taxpayers, businesses, suburban and urban residents, agriculture and the natural environment."27 The Hudson Valley Green Times, a grassroots publication in upstate New York, took a leaf from Jane Austen and tided its issue on the topic "Cents and Sustainability—Development Options for the Hudson Valley."28 New Jersey and Maryland have taken great pains to explain how their State Development and Redevelopment Plan and Smart Growth Plan, respectively, if adhered to, will generate millions of dollars in the more efficient and equitable expenditure of public funds. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released a guidebook, Smart Investmentfor City and County Managers: Energy, Environment and Community Development, targeted at helping municipal managers gTeen their bottom line while they green their cities. Further, Howard's extensive discussion of reforming and rationalizing the "rate-rent" of the garden city, both to afford greater efficiencies and to direct private and public funds toward investment in the new community, finds parallels in a host of present-day organizations. These groups are currendy examining the tax laws and proposing a range of "green tax" schemes whereby capital that supports sustainable development would be rewarded and that which does not would be penalized. Examples include the call for placing a tax on carbon emissions as a means to reduce global warming and New York State's "green building" tax incentives that seek to encourage more environmentally conscious construction techniques. Perhaps surprisingly, Howard's proposals to contain the unbridled expansion of London and other major cities conform to current "pro-growth" strategies seeking to stem the seemingly endless concentration of population in the major cities. Howard proposed to limit the size of great cities through a diffuse development strategy of constructing a series of satellite garden cities in the surrounding countryside. When the garden city reached its limit in population, Howard proposed a "leap-frog" strategy: new development would jump across the garden city's greenbelt and establish a new community, complete in itself. This pattern of metropolitan growth, he predicted, "shall not lessen or destroy, but ever add to its social opportunities, to its beauty, to its convenience."29 The Smart Growth Network, organized by the U.S. EPA, mirrors this progrowth perspective by seeking to limit sprawl through what it terms "realistic development alternatives." The network proposes a choice: "Transportation decisions, large scale developments, comprehensive plans and local economic development decisions can either contribute to sprawl or serve as focal points for development that is environmentally, fiscally, socially and economically

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smart."30 Similarly, the "Eastward Ho!" plan released by the South Florida Regional Planning Council attempts to direct rather than limit growth. In studying how best to revitalize southeastern Florida's urban centers and check sprawl, the council concedes that growth is inevitable: "Given the tremendous population growth that is projected for the next decade, it is unrealistic to presume that westward movement in southeast Florida can be completely halted or reversed. Rather, the objective of eastern urban restoration should be to capture a greater percentage of that projected growth than is now anticipated."31 Maryland and New Jersey are among the leaders of states that are attempting to take action against sprawl and encourage greener, more sustainable communities. Each subscribes to the "directed growth" scenario seeking to encourage growth in designated centers rather than continuing to watch unchecked, unplanned sprawl emanate from the cities. Accompanying these good intentions is a heated debate about what, if any, powers the state should be allowed, not to limit growth but even to direct it. In her testimony before the New Jersey State Senate, the then governor, Christine Todd Whitman, defended her embattled bid to promote the State Plan by insisting: "Clearly, intelligent planning will also allow for intelligent development. This proposal is not, I repeat not, a no-growth plan."32 Decidedly pro-growth in their proposals, both Howard and the contemporary reformers also look to the free market and technological advances to provide answers to their mutual dilemmas. For Howard the mobilization of private capital would provide the means of bringing technology and city planning together with nature to establish a garden city. Throughout Garden Cities of To-morrow he attempted to convince private investors that urban reform through the establishment of these new towns was a positive investment opportunity predicated on sound economic principles. His subsequent arguments pointed to the many opportunities private enterprise would enjoy within the garden city. The initial investors who purchased the land upon which the new community was built would realize a proper return on investment. The factories that employed the city's workforce would receive the benefits of public expenditures on infrastructure and would be able to trade freely with all the world. In addition, he assured the business community, the garden city would offer low rents for its commercial sites and for the houses of laborers. Even Howard's nod to socialism, eventual public ownership of the land, demonstrated how public funds raised from the low rents would be expended largely in the pursuit of providing a convivial atmosphere for commerce. Indeed, in the retail sphere Howard suggested that this

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public ownership be used to provide monopoly status for those willing to trade fairly and abide by the city's moral standards.33 Modern-day sustainability advocates repeat Howard's message that environmentally and socially sound capital investments can be profitable. Stephan Schmidheiny is a leading voice among those advocates who argue that economic and environmental concerns can be joined. A Swiss industrialist, Schmidheiny is head of the Business Council for Sustainable Development and the principal adviser for business and industry to the United Nation's Conference on Environment and Development. In 1992 he authored, with the assistance of the Business Council, the book Changing Course, which became a key treatise for sustainable and green business advocates. Sounding much like Howard in contemporary prose, Schmidheiny frames the sustainability movement's acceptance of a major role for the private sector in solving the current crisis. "Business will play a vital role in the future health of this planet," he declares. "This concept recognizes that economic growth and environmental protection are inextricably linked." To achieve this end, "[n]ew forms of cooperation between government, business and society are required." As was true with Howard, faith in free markets and technological advancement are the paths toward achieving the goal of a greener, more just, and more efficient society: "New technology will be needed to permit growth while using energy and other resources more efficiendy and producing less pollution.... Trade policies and practices should be open, offering opportunities to all nations. Open trade leads to the most efficient use of resources and to the development of economies."34 Schmidheiny sums up the movement's invitation to private enterprise to join in bringing about this better world by stating, "Progress toward sustainable development makes good business sense because it can create competitive advantages and new opportunities."35 The assumption that private capital will eagerly assist in achieving sustainable development has led to several new policy initiatives, including Maryland governor Parris Glendening's Smart Growth program and former New Jersey governor Whitman's creation of the nation's first statewide Office of Sustainability, which she placed in the state's Department of Commerce. A century ago, Howard presented himself first and foremost as a man dedicated to reform, not just of one party but of all. He was attempting to achieve real reform through the connecting thread of his garden city project. He hoped not only to provide an opportunity for ethical investment of capital but also to bring together public, private, and municipal interests through his project for the betterment of each. Howard viewed cooperation on this scale as a "Master

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Key" that would unlock solutions to the most vexing social problems. His efforts to explain the value of his project on this account were almost as extensive as his claims of the problems it would remedy. Democracy was to be an inherent part of the garden city, and its populace was to have many avenues through which to express their will. The city, acting as landlord, would combine the powers of the municipal and the private sector. Its board members and the Central Council would respectively be elected directly and indirecdy by the citizens. The populace was also encouraged to participate in grassroots democracy through the many "municipal societies" that Howard hoped would arise in the garden city. Through the mechanism of the public ownership of land, Howard also hoped that the civic and moral virtues of the inhabitants of the garden city could be expressed in molding the actions of the private sector.36 The sustainability and green movement advocates also propose a rhetoric of democratization as a means of uniting the various strata and interests of society to achieve a common good. The hope that economic development, ecology, and equity—the overlapping rings of the sustainability paradigm—can promote a more just society is perhaps most clearly expressed in A Region at Risk, the Regional Plan Association's 1996 plan for the New York metropolitan region. Sustainability advocates place considerable faith in the "stakeholder process," whereby representatives of each of these interests meet to develop plans or (far less likely) make binding decisions. "This requires corporations to assume more social, economic, and environmental responsibility in defining their roles," Schmidheiny writes. "We must expand our concept of those who have a stake in our operations to include not only employees and shareholders but also suppliers, customers, neighbors, citizens groups, and others. Appropriate communication with these stakeholders will help us to refine continually our visions, strategies, and actions."37 Sustainability reports and "green plans" almost religiously include statements such as that by the South Florida Regional Planning Council in its plan to revitalize the cities of southeast Florida. "This is a beginning, a first step. Over 300 people have worked together for the past six months in one of the most exciting public/private experiments to take place in southeast Florida!"38 Similarly, the Planet Drum Foundation described the events that led to the publication of the Green City Program as a host of meetings that "brought together groups and individuals from specific fields of interest." More than 150 representatives of stakeholder groups attended the various meetings, and another 150 contributed to the process by offering recommendations that were incorporated in the written records of the sessions.39

Green Cities and the Urban Future 2 I 3 Occasionally, these meetings call for the creation of avenues for sustained, democratic input, such as the Green City Program section on "Sustainable Planning" or "Neighborhood Empowerment." More often, the voices that are heard are those of paid professional environmental and social advocates of the middle and upper classes, who periodically open their process to "popular" comment as a means of acquiring greater legitimacy. Social equity, the weak sister of sustainability's trilogy, takes a seemingly perpetual last place behind the economic and environmental concerns of those discussions, a factor that presumably would have alarmed Howard, whose main objective was harnessing economic and environmental forces in the service of deep, long-lasting social reform. Despite this significant difference in strategy, Howard and the current advocates for environmental urban planning share a wide array of tools in the design of their hoped-for cities. Although few, if any, sustainability or green city advocates have gone as far as Howard did in calling for eventual communal ownership of land, many have found common ground in advocating an idea closely associated with Howard, the creation of greenbelts and the preservation of open space in areas surrounding populated centers. Perhaps the most outstanding current example of such planning in the United States is Pordand, Oregon, where a limit-to-growth boundary was placed at the perimeter of the metropolitan area. Patchwork, less comprehensive examples exist throughout the nation, from small nonprofits promoting land acquisition to former New Jersey governor Whitman securing funding to preserve 1 million acres of open space in her state over a period of ten years. Howard declared that in the garden city, "the country must invade the town. " 40 Similarly, contemporary movements seek to green the city itself through extensive urban plantings and park rehabilitation. In New York City over the past two decades, the Central Park Conservancy has spearheaded a coalition of public and private hinders to magnificendy restore Olmsted and Vaux's Central Park in Manhattan. Not to be outdone, across the East River, the Prospect Park Alliance is deploying a similar strategy to restore Brooklyn's own gem created by the two founding fathers of landscape architecture in the United States. Included in the Alliance's Master Plan is a detailed approach to rehabilitate Brooklyn's last remaining forest, which stands within the boundaries of Prospect Park. These are but two examples of a nationwide quilt of local, regional, and national organizations engaged in urban planting in an attempt to create a city with a landscape that fulfills Howard's hope for the garden city, a community where "the beauties of nature may encompass and enfold each dweller therein."41 On the tree-lined streets of the reformed city, Howard and today's environ-

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mental urban advocates—as well as proponents of the New Urbanism—advocate mass transit and pedestrian-friendly design as the preferred means of moving citizens about. For Howard, public health and elevated ease and comfort were the objective, as the automobile was an anti-urban weapon that Garden Cities ofTo-morrow had not anticipated. For today's activists the priority is fighting the onslaught of vehicles that have overrun and eroded much of the modern city. Brisding with an array of strategies from "traffic calming" plans to "critical mass" direct actions in which ragtag armies of cyclists take over rush-hour streets, their objective is to de-vehicularize urban streets to the greatest extent possible and return them to cyclists, pedestrians, and rollerbladers. In terms of production, Howard described what later sustainability advocates would label "eco-efficiency" and "industrial ecology." Howard's plan for an outer ring of industries surrounding the garden city attempted to provide jobs for residents and achieve efficiencies in the distribution of goods and services while reducing the impact of economic activities on the quality of life: "The smoke fiend is kept well within bounds in Garden City; for all machinery is driven by electrical energy, with the result that the cost of electricity for lighting and other purposes is gready reduced."42 11

Such efficiencies that result from the environmental rationalization of production are a leitmotif of the sustainability literature. Indeed, people who have never heard of Ebenezer Howard or read his work employ strikingly similar language urging reductions in transportation and waste and advocating general energy and resource conservation through better environmental planning. Sustainability advocates call for the establishment of "industrial ecology" and "eco-industrial parks," where the cycles of nature are mirrored in the production process. In such facilities the waste products of one industry become the raw materials of another. As Howard explained in simple agrarian terms, "[t]he refuse of the town is utilized on the agricultural portions of the estate... While the town proper, with its population engaged in various trades, callings, and professions, and with a store or depot in each ward, offers the most natural market to the people engaged on the agricultural estate."43 In this manner Howard touched upon several of the themes closest to the overlapping agendas of the sustainability advocates and the New Urbanists. Writing a century before them, he advocated and anticipated industrial ecology, recycling of waste materials, the close proximity of production and consumption, local agriculture, and neighborhood markets within walking distance of people's homes. Perhaps ironically, although to the public at large Howard is vir-

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tually unknown and his works unread, and although the garden cities he helped found or inspire are unreferenced as models, his ideas are once again entering the mainstream of planning. This in turn poses the question whether the "Tomorrow" suggested by Howard's tide is finally dawning. Further, it inquires whether the garden city in its modern form provides a solution to the current, catastrophic environmental crisis. Frederic J. Osborn's preface to the 1946 edition ofGarden Cities of To-morrow astutely analyzed the persistence of Howard's influence, which was very strong at a time when the British government was inaugurating its New Towns program: It is of interest to note that every one of the components of Howard's Garden City proposal has had in recent years its band of devotees, though many of them have ignored Howard and his movement.... Thus we have had . . . a highly influential movement for the preservation of the agricultural countryside against ribbons of . . . houses along main roads and scattered buildings in pleasant places. Another powerful movement specialized on the demands for playingfieldsand open spaces, another attended to the need for local facilities, for community life, and . . . the "neighborhood unit." Another concentrated on the aesthetic aspects of development and agitated for architectural control of individual buildings and streets.... Others devoted themselves to better housing standards, tree planting, the control of advertisements, smoke abatement, rural rehabilitation, and beautification of roads. The building of industrial [enterprise zones] as a means of encouraging the settlement of factories in areas where industrial employment was desired was undertaken by Government agencies. Each of these admirable causes has made a deep but separate impression on public opinion, and in the last few years, their advocates have drawn closer together. Now that a synthesis is being attained, to what does it come? Precisely to the principles of development so lucidly expounded in [his] book, and exemplified in the two Garden Cities which Howard founded.44 At the time Osborn wrote this assessment of Howard's influence, cities were still the flagships of their nation, and wide swaths of farmland and forest still surrounded metropolitan areas. Flush with victory over fascism and buoyed by the hope of rising standards of living and new technologies, people seemed to see room for optimism. Since Osborn's reporting of the "synthesis" of Howard's "principles of development," the advent of cheap oil, the increasing dominance of the automobile, and misguided national policies on transportation and development have rav-

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aged cities, despoiled their surrounding countryside, and extended outward to affect communities, cultures, and ecosystems around the world. The tentacles of a sprawling, formless metropolis and profligate disregard for the environment make the depredations of the early urban industrial period appear only as the predecessor to destruction and genocide on a global scale. The emergence of a new, contemporary movement, also coalescing toward a synthesis of Howard's principles of development, is, in and of itself, not a negative event. That it believes itself to be a novel innovation and does so with virtually no knowledge that it follows in nearly the exact path of a movement that began one hundred years ago is disturbing. This lack of historical knowledge earmarks it for failure or at best the limited success that its predecessor gained. The philosopher George Santayana once remarked that those who are ignorant of their history are doomed to repeat it. Given the stakes as we edge ever closer to environmental and social catastrophe, such a repetition would be disastrous. Yet armed with such knowledge, there is hope, as Howard acknowledged in a chapter apdy entided "Some Difficulties Considered":

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A successful invention or discovery is usually a slow growth, to which new elements are added, and from which old elements are removed.... Indeed, it may be truly said that if youfinda series of experiments continued through many years by various workers, there will eventually be produced the result for which so many have been industriously searching. Long continued effort, in spite of failure and defeat, is the forerunner of complete success. He who wishes to achieve success may turn past defeat into future victory by observing one condition. He must profit by past experiences and aim at retaining all the strong points without the weaknesses of former efforts.*5 Successful experimentation requires a working knowledge of previous efforts. It is clear that Howard was well versed in the work of both his contemporaries and his predecessors. Today's civic reformers and environmental activists, often sharply lacking such a historical perspective, would do well to follow in his footsteps. Despite such differences, the greatest weakness exhibited by each party, both past and present, is its assumption of the malleability of the vested interests of society. Both Howard and today's advocates underestimate the resistance such interests will present to the deeper and more meaningful aspects of the reformer's plans. When asked rhetorically whether "frankly avowing the very great danger to the vested interests of this country which your scheme indirecdy threat-

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ens" would make such change impossible, Howard blithely answered, "I think not." He anticipated that "those vested interests which are said to be ranged like a solid phalanx against progress, will, by the force of circumstances and the current of events, be for once divided into opposing camps." The key was the success of the garden city, which would "drive into the very bed-rock of vested interests a great wedge, which will split them asunder with irresistible force, and permit the current legislation to set strongly in a new direction."46 In similar fashion have today's sustainability advocates adhered too strongly to the notion that a new, private-sector paradigm will arise. From it, they propose, a new economic class will emerge for whom profit can be successfully secured while respecting the rights of ecology and community. Although such an arrangement may be gained by singular and exceptional firms (one thinks of Robert Owen and the textile mills of the mid-nineteenth century), it must still be remembered that short-term profits are most easily secured through exploitation of one form or another. Few companies have the vision or the luxury of long-term timelines where earnings are concerned. As Paul Hawken notes in The Ecology of Commerce, in an era of a global economy there is no such thing as efficiency. There are only externalized costs. Driving those costs from external exploitation to internal responsibility on a systemwide basis is an extremely difficult project. While efforts to induce the business class to internalize environmentally and socially sustainable values should not be discouraged, they need to be set within a larger context and strategy. Howard and, especially, sustainability advocates today place an inordinate emphasis upon reforming a single element of society; in both cases the financial community, in order to achieve success. In doing so, they abandon the keystone of their respective rhetorics, namely the notion that the city and society must come to be viewed and understood as an organic whole. It is because of this unity between the city and society that urban centers have been the focal points in nearly every major social transformation in human history. Beginning with the Neolithic period, they became the groundwork for the rise of the great empires. Later, as the ruins of the Roman world revived, the nascent cities gave birth to modern Europe and became the cradle of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. In each phase cities remade themselves anew. Now we stand at the threshold of another great transformation in the human story. It is one that can only be achieved if the city once again reinvents itself, this time as a green city united in ecological balance both with itself and with the

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environment that embraces it. It is the city as a whole that must gain these ends. It must do so not just in its outward appearance or contemporary guise but at its core, in the essential features that the city has carried with it through its changes and that have stood at the heart of its lasting power. As Lewis Mumford states in his epic City in History, "to define the city one must look for its organizing nucleus. While the city brought together and welded into visible unity village, shrine, stronghold, workplace and market, its character altered from region to region, from age to age, as one or another component dominated and colored the rest. But always, as in a living cell, the organizing nucleus was essential to direct the growth and the organic differentiation of the whole."47 It is here, in this nucleus, that both the crisis and the salvation of the city can be found. The city was born of the rich ecosystems that were its mother's milk and founded upon the notion of place. It has since emerged into a society now terribly at war with the environment and embracing a culture of multinational capital in which place is an abstraction and an obstacle. The crisis of society and of the city is that the city's current form is at war with its essence. The only way it can survive and flourish is to reinvent itself once again. This new form must be not merely a collection of the old, now gready enlarged; it must be something that encompasses the past while giving birth to qualitative change. In order to resolve the current crisis and transcend the limited but noble work put forth by Howard and today's sustainability advocates, each of the essential features of the city must be reimagined. In the community's role as village and dwelling place, Mumford notes, "one must not of course overlook the practical needs that drew family groups and tribes together... the pure spring with its year round supply of water, the solid hummock of land, accessible, yet protected by river or swamp, the nearby estuary heavily stocked with fish and shellfish."48 In constant relations with the rich, natural environment and the new ideas and perspectives brought by travelers of connecting trade and pilgrimage routes, the city established its fundamental premise. "Into this life with its erotic exuberance a new order, a new regularity, a new security"49 was born, yielding "an association dedicated to a life more abundant."50 This abundance offered itself in the greater food, shelter, security, genes, ideas, religious and spiritual dimensions, aesthetics, social intercourse, and art newly available to the city's inhabitants. Yet this abundance and this meaning is being rapidly undermined as we savagely sever the cords of support between the city and the natural world. The fundamental purpose of the city is to create a dialogue. The more in-

Green Cities and the Urban Future elusive it is, the more dramatic the discourse. In this regard, if a city of one man is no city, then neither can a city of one species be a city. The city of the future, the green city, must reestablish the city's greatest contribution, diversity, on a higher plane. This diversity must manifest itself not just among the city's human inhabitants but in the city's relationship to its surrounding world and to the life, both human and nonhuman, that it invites to reside within it. It has been the project of the city to create a new, more expansive person. In history, the king was to embody the wholeness of this human community. If through a thousand years of struggle this role became the province of all citizens, then the green city will be created by those citizens who, as the king foreshadowed before, represent the whole community of life. This revolution in the role of the city as dwelling place can only be accomplished if there is an equal revolution in its role as shrine. From its earliest incarnation to the present, the role of urban life has been to regiment humanity, master nature, and focus each on the service of the gods. The "reason" for the city has been to serve and magnify these gods in their changing religious, secular, and monetary guises. The green city embraces this essential role as shrine yet reconstitutes it at a higher level. Rather than to master humanity and nature, the green city seeks to create a synergy between them in the service of each. In addition to the shrines, churches, mosques, and synagogues that have been the focal points of cities and neighborhoods for millennia, the green city expands the spiritual to include nature itself. The rivers, hills, forests, creeks, estuaries, wedands, and other elements of creation within the city's boundary are shrines worthy of service and respect, too. Their rhythms inform and guide the city's inhabitants. In this fashion the green city balances the ancient city's role as a "replica of heaven" by standing as a "replica of earth," joining all of its life forces to achieve greater evolutionary ends. As the green city addresses the spiritual life of its citizens, so too must it fulfill its ancient role as defender of their material world. As Mumford observed, "to exert power in every form was the essence of civilization: the city found a score of ways of expressing struggle, aggression, domination, conquest and servitude."51 With the rise of the multinational corporation, the city has lost its role as the primary expression of social force and has been largely relegated to the position of servitude. Its wall, which once provided for the defense and social identity of its people, at first in real terms and later symbolically, has been breached by the growing power of multinational capital. "Without that founda-

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tion, without that containment, without that enclosure and order, the city might never have been conceived."52 That delicate membrane, which allowed for the intercourse of ideas but retained the integrity of the city as a unique expression of human community, has been torn and is now threatened with extinction by globalization. The only path for the city back from this brink is through its rediscovery of place. Just as natural abundance and a sense of place gave birth to the city, these same factors must be foundations for any effort to achieve its survival and continued growth. The grid of its historical development and the diffuse shape of its conternporary form must give way to the slant, the roll, the adherence to topography and climate, the recognition of the path of the sun and of the city's relationship with its surroundings. The modern city must abandon its wanton disregard for the natural world, its celebration of abstraction, in favor of a distinct relationship with place. In this fashion the city will then be able to deploy the technologies that will enable it to receive, concentrate, and transform the energy flows that nature provides. As the ancient cities kept garden allotments and cattle within their walls as insurance against a siege, the green city will assert its potential for independence through proper design and the use of technologies such as solar panels, fuel cells, electric light-rail, and urban agriculture. Independence will not be based upon isolation from the world at large but upon an ability to meet the forces of the world on equal footing. In tandem with this redesign of urban form must come the emergence of a new economic order. This new economy cannot be the mere "greening" of the current structure of business or the arrival of a long lost "truer" form of socialism. Rather, as Howard noted in Garden Cities of To-morrow, "the whole system of production and of distribution must undergo changes as complete and as remarkable as was the change from a system of barter to our present complicated commercial system."53 The role of the green city is to be the crucible within which the alchemy of this new system is forged. It will fulfill the traditional urban role as the hothouse for revolutionary transformation of the human community. As Mumford has argued, "the city is a theater of action," and by this act the green city will contribute to the solution of the current global crisis while healing one of its ancient wounds: Thus at the very beginning the urban heritage bifurcated; and the differences between the two great systems remain visible, though often disguised, throughout ur-

Green Cities and the Urban Future ban history. Two ways were in fact open for the development of human culture . . . to speak in biological terms, the symbiotic and the predatory. They were not absolute choices but they pointed in different directions. The first was the path of voluntary cooperation, mutual accommodation, wider communication and understanding: its outcome would be an organic association of a more complex nature, on a higher level.... The other was that of predatory domination, leading to heartless exploitation and eventually to parasitic enfeeblement: the way of expansion, with its violence, its conflicts, its anxieties.... This second form has largely dominated urban history till our own age, and it accounts in no small degree for the enclosure and collapse of one civilization after another.54 The collapse of our civilization is occurring before our eyes. While our material wealth continues to expand, the ecological systems upon which it is founded are being rapidly cut away. The judgment of history upon such a path is not far distant. The green city offers hope for civilization because it carries the mande of Mumford's symbiotic city. It is the means by which the "supreme gift of the city" can be realized, providing stability, diversity, and constant creativity not only to humanity but also to the whole community of life. In achieving a symbiotic relationship between humanity and nature and a new synergy between ecology, democracy, economy, religion, and technology, the green city will, as Ebenezer Howard hoped for his own project, "lead society on to a far higher destiny than it has ever yet ventured to hope for, though such a future has often been foretold by daring spirits."55

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cent of the world's population, or less than 250 million people, lived in urban setdements at the start of the twentieth century. Yet the trends were already clear. As agricultural improvements and industrialization spread across the world, urbanization followed. In writing about Britain in the 1890s, however, Howard could genuinely feel that he was also proposing a global solution. This assumption came easily at a time when London was the source of many new trends and Britain was still the dominant power in world affairs. Howard was certainly no chauvinist or imperialist, but even his gende alternative voice gained in authority from this wider context. In 1900, for example, he could write that "[t]o solve the problem of the great city in England is to solve it for all of Europe, America, Asia and Africa."3 If Australians thought they had been left out, he later hoped that one of "the brightest and best chapters" of the garden city story would be written in the "great continent of the Pacific."4

T h e F a i l u r e of Real R e f o r m

When Ebenezer Howard wrote To-morrow, during the 1890s, he had a unique vantage point to observe the urban condition. He lived in what was then the world's largest city, London, with some 6.5 million inhabitants. Even today that figure would put it in the international ranks of the big, if no longer the giant, cities. London also dominated the urban system of what, by several measures, was the world's most heavily urbanized country, where three-quarters of the population lived in towns and cities. Many of Britain's other urban setdements, as they expanded, were growing together into large, continuously built regions. For these a Scottish contemporary of Howard, Patrick Geddes, would shortly coin the new label conurbation.1 Across the rest of the world, there were only a few other urban concentrations whose populations could be measured in millions.2 One of these, New York, would overtake London a few years before Howard died in 1928. By 1900, indeed, the United States, the country outside Britain that was most familiar to Howard, already had an urban population greater than that of his own country (though this was still a much smaller proportion of the national total). Germany was also close to this same situation. Overall, though, these countries were still relatively unusual. Only about 15 per-

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Despite such hopes, however, Howard's grand vision of a peaceful path to real (social) reform was nowhere fulfilled. Many parts of the world (especially, but certainly not exclusively, the anglophone world) were deeply touched by his ideas. Yet the direct impact of what, when he published his book, were his most cherished ideas was quite small. Even in his own country, where his thinking had the most obvious effects on actual planning policies, his social reformist message was not adopted. The two garden cities at Letchworth (1903-) and Welwyn (1920-) were the best embodiments of his thinking.5 They were, by any standards, remarkable achievements. But there were many compromises, especially at Welwyn Garden City (which was largely developed after his death). The most crucially important was that the central principle of collective community ownership of the land on which the garden cities were built was never realized in the way he hoped. The companies established to build the garden cities were scarcely models of stakeholder cooperation. Moreover, in order to attract investment, they granted very long leases on terms fixed at the outset. The result was that the citizens of the garden cities never became the beneficiaries of the rise in land values that came from urban development, at least not in any very significant collective sense. Any prospect of a continuous capture of increased land value, especially from higher-value activities, had to be quickly jettisoned. The only effective method of collectively recouping the increased value was through state ownership of the land, something that Howard himself never

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wanted. This was the approach followed in the thirty-two New Towns developed in Britain and Northern Ireland in the half century from 1946 (and, justifiably, seen as the greatest planning achievement anywhere to follow direcdy from Howard's ideas).6 The effect was that the considerable profits that accrued from building the New Towns flowed into the national government coffers, instead of a local, democratically accountable, community chest. Ultimately, when the commercial property assets of the New Towns were sold off by Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s, the remaining part of these benefits went to the real estate companies and developers who acquired them. Or, in the other main dimension of the Thatcher sell-off of the New Towns, they went to the many families who bought their formerly rented homes at discounted prices. The financial rewards were thus enjoyed by the citizens of the New Town, but on an individualized basis, rather than remaining for the collective benefit of the whole community, as Howard had intended. Perhaps this was as good as it was ever likely to get in a capitalist society.

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Overall, therefore, Howard's vision of a peaceful path to real social reform achieved through community ownership of land never materialized. This was not, of course, the whole story. Very quickly, the garden city came to be understood in a more limited sense, as an urban planning model to reform the spatial arrangement of social and economic life. It is through this understanding that Howard's legacy has largely been experienced. Many commentators, led by Lewis Mumford and Peter Hall, have seen Howard as the single most important figure in the international development of urban planning.7 It is for what was originally this almost incidental by-product of his ideas that we remember him. The comparatively few, if enormously suggestive, pages of To-morrow that discuss the garden city as a physical vision of urban living are now the only ones that most of us read.8 Even then, in our mind's eye, we often transpose the reality of the environments created by the early garden city planners for the images drawn by Howard's words and simple diagrams.

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have seen, Howard was very enthusiastic about the way his early professional associates interpreted his vision, adopting the architectural language of the Arts and Crafts movement. Yet the residential densities he had actually proposed in To-morrow were significandy higher. To judge from his described lot sizes, average net densities were roughly a third higher than the 12 houses to the acre (30 to the hectare) that soon became understood as the garden city standard in Britain.9 Howard's original densities were actually quite close to those already appearing by the 1890s in row housing being built under local building bylaws for better-off workers around British cities.10 But it was the new formula of 12 to the acre that now became, in the eyes of the British guardians of the faith, the "true" standard, the yardstick against which all other efforts should be measured. The reality varied drastically. At one extreme were Australia's bungalow garden suburbs such as Colonel Light Gardens in Adelaide (fig. 66).11 At the other were the higher densities, with extensive use of apartment blocks, found in some parts of continental Europe, for example in the interwar Parisian cites-jardin such as

H o w a r d ' s Influence o n T w e n t i e t h - C e n t u r y P l a n n i n g •iii i,

It was the residential environments and site layouts created by Raymond Unwin, Barry Parker, and those who followed that became the most specific direct legacy of the garden city. The creation of a form of environment that embodied both town and country was hardly new, of course, but the garden city movement elaborated it in a way that was accessible to lower-income households. As we

Figure 66. Colonel Light Gardens, Mitcham, in suburban Adelaide, South Australia. Planned from 1917 by the garden city advocate Charles Reade, this garden suburb combined the garden city residential ideal with the Australian bungalow. Author.

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Figure 67. Suresnes, Henri Sellier's best-known cite-jardin in the western suburbs of Paris. This shows one of the earliest sections, developed in the early 1920s, with a mixture of multistory apartments and low-rise development. Higher densities allowed high-quality local services to be provided. Author.

Suresnes (fig. 67), or the post-1945 western garden cities of Amsterdam.12 When it first appeared, however, the label "garden city" (which was widely adopted in many different languages) everywhere implied densities lower than those usual for equivalent housing in the country concerned. The pursuit of lower density is a symptom of perhaps the most central part of the Howard legacy to twentieth-century planning. This is the relationship between the artificial world of industrialism and the natural world of plants and animals. As noted earlier in this book, Howard followed the transcendentalists in seeing this as an expression of a more profound relationship between humanity and God. He also found a more precise representation of it in the twin polarities of town and country, with the garden city becoming the specific means of reconciling the two. Rarely have the planners who followed Howard been quite so explicit in revealing, even to themselves, the more mystical, religious aspects of this relationship. Yet this notion of a need to appease and reconcile nature, both symbolically and practically, remained one of the more powerful and deeply held assumptions of twentieth-century planning.

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The other enduring theme of the garden city legacy has been the sense that community—the relationship of human beings with one another—can be created, or at least enhanced, by conscious planning and design. Like the reconciliation of nature with industrialism, this was a series of aspirations rather than a precise formula. It was expressed in several ways. A major concern was that as many resident workers as possible should also have their workplace in the garden city. Even more important was that the houses should be grouped in ways that, while respecting family privacy, also gave opportunities for sociability (fig. 68).13 Another aspect was the close relationship of residential areas to local services and other parts of the garden city. Howard, again, was certainly eager that all these planning objectives be pursued. But in his original vision, they formed only a part of the social glue of the garden city. His notion was that community should primarily grow from a collective sense of ownership of the garden city by its people. Physical planning and design would reflect this common ownership rather than be a substitute for it. Howard's book also promoted a holistic and comprehensive approach to planning, a notion fostered by those who designed the garden city. Because it

Figure 68. Washington New Town, showing typical British New Town residential development of the later 1960s, with play spaces and complete separation of pedestrian and cycle movements from motor traffic. Author's collection.

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was an entirely new settlement, it was obviously necessary to consider and make provision for all aspects of its development. This was especially so since it was consciously conceived outside the mainstream of capitalist urbanization. Everything about its pattern of development therefore needed to be articulated with precision to lay a complete physical basis for community life and create the "proper" relationship with nature. Within this holistic approach, it is also possible to identify many individual ideas that have been applied separately or in various combinations in twentieth-century planning. The most important was the notion of applying limits to the growth of any individual garden city. This was to be enforced largely by having a permanent agricultural belt surrounding each garden city, an idea that had a major impact on planning thought. Although other planning traditions have contributed to the concept of the containing greenbelt, encircling the city and stopping its outward expansion, it derives primarily from the garden city tradition. (Less formal attention was given to the possibilities of having a very localized food supply. Howard never envisaged the complete self-sufficiency that is sometimes claimed, but he clearly wanted a sizable local market.)14 Another critically important concept seeded within the comprehensive approach was of planning on hierarchical principles. This was evident in relation to provision for movement patterns and provision of public services. Different scales of roads were provided for different purposes, so that main through routes were differentiated from residential access roads and narrow culs-de-sac. Howard's division of the garden city into separate wards also laid the basis for an increasingly sophisticated application of hierarchical principles in the provision of schools, shops, local health facilities, and other essential components of a community. A central assumption of the comprehensive planning approach was the clear separation of major land uses, particularly of industry and commerce from housing. Neither hierarchy nor zoning were inventions of the garden city movement, but their location within a holistic planning approach helped establish their legitimacy as planning devices. The same was true of regional planning, a practice elaborated by many minds other than Howard's. Yet the network of garden cities represented by his Social City diagram (see fig. 2, above) and his discussion of the future of London was automatically creating a larger frame of reference and set of relationships that needed to be considered. Specific types of mono-functional planned urban space that have been important in twentieth-century planning were also suggested by the garden city idea. The most significant were the industrial estate or park and the shopping

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mall. Again, it would be incorrect to say that they were innovations entirely associated with the garden city. Britain's first industrial estate (usually claimed as the world's first) had appeared in 1896 at Trafford Park in Manchester.15 Covered collective retailing spaces of the type suggested by Howard's Crystal Palace had an even longer history in Britain and, even more, continental Europe. 16 Nor were the early practical efforts of garden city planners especially impressive. The garden city tradition, however, showed how both industrial estates and collective retailing spaces could be used within a comprehensive planning approach, to serve public purposes wider than those of private profit.

D e c o n s t r u c t i o n a n d RediscoveryOverall, then, the garden city tradition contributed or underpinned a large part of the theory and practice of twentieth-century urban planning. To an extent far greater than any other comparable approach, it endowed urban planning with a social and community dimension. It also added very significandy to urban planning's design and environmental repertoire. As a holistic approach, it further offered a setting within which individual planning ideas and practices of various origins could be located. This body of thinking exerted its greatest influence from the 1920s to the 1950s.17 By the 1940s, though, the term garden city was increasingly subsumed within wider planning discourse, especially that focused on New Towns. The new term essentially signified an approach that was more statist and more influenced by modernist architectural thinking than the garden city original. It also marginalized, almost to the point of extinction, the spirit of cooperative voluntarism on which the garden city ideal had been constructed. The replacement image rested on state planning under social democracy. The Howard legacy was still there, but it was certainly less central to the New Towns movement. Nevertheless, in this form it achieved great success as an integral part of the Western urban planning repertoire over the postwar years. Almost all Western countries (and many other parts of the world) adopted variants of ideas that could pardy, often mainly, be traced back to Howard. The characteristically British approach to metropolitan planning, with self-contained New Towns set beyond a restricting greenbelt to prevent peripheral suburban expansion, remained most faithful to his ideas.18 Yet most other ways of accommodating metropolitan growth owed something to Howard. These included the rail-based satellites of Stockholm and the development fingers of the famous Copenhagen

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health of big cities, especially in the United States and Britain, began to fail seriously during the 1970s, however, the commitment to planned decentralization waned. In Britain the New Towns program, still widely understood as the purest embodiment of the garden city tradition, was wound down.23 The American new communities program, having never flourished, was allowed to wither.24 The Anglo-American political ascendancy of promarket forces in the 1980s completed the demise of the new town idea in two of the countries that had contributed most to its development. By 1996 all the state development corporations created to build Britain's New Towns were gone.

Figure 69. The antithesis of Howard, modernist industrialized public-sectorflatsat Hulme, Manchester, U.K., awaiting demolition in 1997. Author.

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plan. 19 But as time went on, the ascendancy of modernist architecture, the increasing pursuit of high-rise housing construction, and the growing obsession with planning for motor vehicles blurred many of the connections. This was perhaps just as well. During the 1960s and especially the 1970s, the wider discourse of planning was increasingly criticized. One of the earliest, and still most powerful, critics was Jane Jacobs, who did not overlook the garden city legacy.20 In 1961 she lambasted Howard in a book that Mumford described as "stimulating and awful."21 In her view Howard was a city destroyer, promoting a narrowly defined and deeply reactionary Utopia, one that did not reflect how cities really worked and was imposed by an authoritarian professional elite. (Le Corbusier got comparable treatment.) Her personal criticisms of Howard reflected an almost total ignorance of his life, character, and aspirations, but her book was hugely influential throughout the West. It was the first important salvo in an attack on the planners that grew in strength over the following years. For a time urban freeways and urban renewal took the brunt of the criticisms (fig. 69). (Even Mumford and Jacobs could still join forces to block a Robert Moses-proposed expressway.)22 As the economic

Yet a significant part of what was being rejected did not actually come from Howard. As noted, his had been a very participative vision of the garden city community. It was certainly not one to be imposed by an unresponsive state power exercised by unelected bureaucrats and experts. In a curious way, the new emphases, partly derived from the antiplanning activism that appeared in all Western countries during the 1960s and 1970s, began to return to several of Howard's overarching themes.25 Many of his key ideas—cooperation, community, and the reconciliation of nature and humanity—were also central to the small and beautiful world urged by E. F. Schumacher and increasingly reflected in neighborhood activism and the emergent green movement of the 1970s.26 It would be incorrect, however, to imply that there was any widespread recognition of the salience of Howard's original message for the new thinking. Fairly or otherwise, Howard was tainted by association with the established planning approach that was being challenged. Nonetheless, what was apparent by the late 1970s and 1980s was a growing revisionism among those sympathetic to the garden city tradition. The altered view was fueled in part by the work of planning historians. It became increasingly clear that the garden city was more than just the quaint prelude to the New Town. To sympathizers, at least, Howard's original ideas, stripped of later accretions, had a powerful contemporary resonance. In 1977-78, for example, the new Ecology and Development Group of the Town and Country Planning Association (as the Garden City Association was now called) launched a project for a third garden city.27 What followed, a tiny self-built development at Lightmoor in Telford New Town (fig. 70), was disappointing in scale but enormously encouraging in its green credentials and participative style.

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I I Figure 70. During the 1970s, there were attempts to go back to the roots of the garden city movement, and a project for a third garden city was launched. The result was the small, self-built community at Lightmoor, in Telford New Town. Author. >m I 'Ilrl'lii

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initiatives, most prominendy the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, elaborated what sustainable development might mean in practice, at national and local levels.30 There has also been a great deal of comparable activity in particular global regions, especially the European Community.31 Sustainable urban development has proved exceptionally difficult to define. Urbanization, of whatever character, constitutes a dramatic environmental change that removes land from other less damaging uses. Cities have huge environmental "footprints" calling on the resources of areas far larger than their own, to feed, clothe, house, and (for the fortunate) pamper their populations. They also account for the bulk of global pollution. To mention the other side of the argument, they are also the source of, or play a direct role in creating, most of the world's wealth and many of the good things that can follow. Their concentration of people, ideas, and values gives them the possibility of being wonderfully creative places. However much we pretend otherwise (or seek to disguise it within semirural settings), the majority of the world's population, especially in the developed world, prefers an urban way of life. Any changing of this situation is inconceivable. Sustainable urban development therefore comes to mean the attempt to minimize the negative impacts of cities. This involves questioning current practices regarding land use, energy production and consumption, waste disposal, and pollution. All this has important implications for topics that have always been close to the core of urban planning, notably density, the spatial relationship between different activities, and transport.

A N e w Paradigm While this was under way, a complete new planning paradigm based on sustainable development began to take shape. The term sustainable development itself was launched upon the world in 1987 with the publication of Our Common Future: the Report of the World Commission on the Environment and Development.29 Chaired by the Norwegian prime minister, Gro Harlem Brunddand, the commission's report centered on the concept of sustainable development. In the much quoted (if beguilingly vague) words of the report, this was "development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."29 The idea was not new, however. It had come from the experiences of the developing world, where attempts to promote development had often triggered long-term environmental damage. Sustainable development was intended to minimize these impacts. The significance of the Brunddand Report was to place this approach on the agenda of the whole world, especially the developed world. During the 1990s a spate of international

Sustainable D e v e l o p m e n t a n d t h e H o w a r d L e g a c y i n Britain To those familiar with the garden city, its concern to reconcile town and country seems to have a lot in common with sustainable development's reconciliation of development and environment. Despite this, we struggle to find even the barest mention of the garden city idea in the many acres of (recycled) paper that have been consumed to elaborate this new interest at the international level. For example, the important European Commission Green Paper on the Urban Environment, published in 1990, mentioned the garden city only twice, both times critically.32 It blamed the garden city (with the Athens Charter) for zoning. It also saw the garden city as part of the inspiration for large, sprawling social housing projects on the edges of many cities. The preferred solution was the compact city (on which much has subsequendy been written).33 In official Europe-

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wide thinking, however, it already seemed that the compact city did not mean the garden city, at least not in its classic expression. As might be expected, more interest in the garden city as a sustainable form of community has been expressed in Britain than almost anywhere else in Europe. Predictably, the focus for most of this sympathy has been the Town and Country Planning Association.34 The main advocates, among them Mike Breheny, David Lock, Susan Owens, Peter Hall, and Colin Ward, have continued to see a role for medium-sized new setdements, around the 30,000 population mark, designed with local employment and services and good public transit access to larger centers. Where local planning authorities are sympathetic (a rare event), setdements of this type may even be built.35 ! Ill

Persuasive though these arguments seem to those who already think this way, there is a profound opposition to any widespread adoption of this approach in Britain. The reason, essentially, is a deep-seated reluctance to countenance any large greenfield developments, especially in the most heavily populated (and politically fickle) southeastern region of Britain. There is a paradox here, which will be familiar to planners everywhere: the majority of Britons still seem to aspire to low density semirural living for themselves but, in effect, want most other people (particularly if they are poorer) to live somewhere else at higher density. A further paradox is that greenbelt policy, a derivation from Howard, has legitimated the opposition to any new variant of a garden city program. It is virtually impossible to develop on greenbelts and extremely difficult to gain approval for large developments in the areas beyond them. The consequence has been to focus attention on development of brownfield (i.e. previously developed) land (fig. 71). Although some parts of rural areas (ex-military bases, for example) fall into this category, most brownfield areas are in the larger existing urban centers. From the mid-1990s there has been a political consensus that at least 60 percent of all new housing development should be on brownfield land.36 This is in response to a long-term trend in housing development in Britain, especially by private housing developers, of favoring greenfield development. The potential effect of that trend intensified when the Thatcher administration drastically curbed state subsidized housing, since the state has historically been the other main housing provider. The result was that about half of the land used for new housing development in Britain during the mid-1990s was at densities below 20 dwellings per hectare (8 per acre).37 There is an understandable feeling that any early large-scale provision for the 40 percent greenfield development would effectively prejudice use of the brownfields. Almost all attention has thus been fo-

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Figure 71. Brownfield renewal at medium density in Hulme, Manchester, U.K., influenced by New Urbanist thinking. Compare withfigure69, which shows the type of environment that this replaced. Author.

cused on brownfield development, most notably in the recent report of the Urban Task Force, led by Lord Rogers of Riverside. Despite Sir Peter Hall's membership, the garden city tradition is acknowledged politely but then ignored. 38

Sustainable U r b a n i s m in C o n t i n e n t a l E u r o p e It is noticeable that the Urban Task Force's report, published in 1999, uses many European references to illustrate and bolster its argument.39 Dominant among these are the Netherlands and Germany (with Barcelona also a pervasive, if usually less specific, influence). This emphasis breaks a long-term trend in British international lesson drawing, of looking more across the Adantic than across the Channel or the North Sea. There are American references in the Rogers report, but here the positive is balanced by some negatives, the most serious of which is, predictably, low density automobile-dependent suburban sprawl. (And there is no mention of current American interest in the New Ur-

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banism or smart growth.) Continental Europe is seen as far more virtuous in the promotion of compact, sustainable urbanism. To a large extent, this reflects reality. Continental European cities have, in the long term, performed much better in maintaining higher densities in their cities without compromising their attractiveness and livability. To many tastes, higher densities have actually enhanced these qualities. These established traditions mean that there is now less built-in cultural opposition to the concept of a compact city. Berlin, for example, is currendy aiming to meet 90 percent of its planned future requirement for extra dwellings without greenfield development. 40 This is an exceptionally high proportion, partly reflecting a legacy of underused land in the former Communist eastern part of the city. Yet many other cities, not just in Germany but throughout continental Europe and the Nordic countries, have used infilling and intensification to a much greater extent than has been typical in the Anglo-American world. This does not remove the need for greenfield development. In one sense it may actually increase it. Having a long tradition of creating compact cities means that possibilities of further infill are often rather limited. This is evident in the Netherlands, where quite significant developments on greenfield sites are still occurring. Yet this too is done very compacdy, with much higher densities than would traditionally be expected in Anglo-American suburbs. Nieuw Sloten, developed from the early 1990s as a continuation of Amsterdam's western garden cities, is a particularly interesting example.41 Consisting of about 5,000 dwellings together with some offices, shopping, and local services, it continues the city's earlier interpretations of the garden city idea but merges these with the newer commitment to the compact city. A new tram route emphasizes this by connecting the area to the central part of the city. Residential density is about 56 dwellings per hectare (about 22 per acre). There are some high-rise residential blocks, but much development is carefully planned low-rise housing built in row formation. Small back gardens are provided, but front gardens are usually absent, though signified by a raised planting bed linking the street and the house. This type of compact garden suburb, actually at residential densities not much higher than Howard originally proposed (his smallest plot sizes suggest perhaps 19 dwellings per acre) is by no means unique in the Dutch context. Later growth areas, for example the expansion of Utrecht at Leidische Rijn, are setting new standards, especially incorporating more environmental features.42 An example that has more in common with the freestanding garden city is Houten, about 10 kilometers from Utrecht. It is a rail-oriented, relatively high density,

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low-rise development, currendy with about 30,000 residents but being extended. The planning is designed to discourage car use within the town and encourage walking and bicycle use (always a very strong Dutch theme). Despite all this, however, many growth centers Like Houten, some distance from larger cities, show a high reliance on car-based commuting to employment. This is even more apparent at Almere, a large new town intended to accommodate population and economic activity that otherwise would locate in or nearer to Amsterdam on the reclaimed Flevoland polder.43 It was planned from the late 1970s, before the compact city idea was so strongly accepted. Development has evolved, though, to reflect the new fashion as it has proceeded. The built environment is very different from the classic American (or British) carbased suburb. Densities are higher (at about 35 dwellings per hectare, 14 per acre), more so in the vicinity of the local centers. Long-term proposals are for further reclamation to create a new Amsterdam-Almere corridor of development land, served by a new rail link and providing new areas for expansion. Overall, the Dutch approach to green urbanism, though it is deservedly one of the most studied internationally in recent years, has some unique features. The most important is the role of land reclamation. Few other countries would consider such an approach, which creates new "greenfield" development land without subtracting from existing rural land. (It also creates very dramatic environmental changes, raising questions as to how sustainable it really is.) Less often examined but also interesting from the point of view of the garden city legacy are the current debates in Sweden. In earlier postwar years, Stockholm was perceived as a high point of the garden city-New Town movement. Early satellite towns, particularly Vallingby and Farsta, brought together modernist design and garden city principles in an elegant and widely admired solution to the problem of metropolitan planning.44 Progressively less admired (especially by the Swedes themselves) were the later, more distant, and more anonymous satellites built in high-rise form with industrialized building methods. The model fell from favor dramatically in the 1970s. After a brief but ultimately unrewarding love affair with Anglo-American-style market-led urban development in the 1980s, Sweden began in the 1990s to seek a sustainable approach, in line with its Nordic and continental neighbors. One of the paths followed has taken the debate back to Sweden's first engagement with the garden city. The early garden suburbs such as Enskede in Stockholm (fig. 72), developed in several distinct phases from 1908, elegantiy combined urbanity, community, and Swedish design traditions. Later districts

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tionale Bauausstellung, or International Building Exhibition) Emscher Park in the Ruhr metropolitan area included several projects based in Gartenstadte (garden cities, effectively garden suburbs or industrial villages).47 These involved conservation and innovatively designed modern additions and embellishments, for example at Schiingelburg in Gelsenkirchen (figs. 74-75). At different locations, occasional new interpretations of the garden city concept have also been attempted on a small scale, most explicidy at the Gartenstadt Seseke-Aue in Kamen.

N e w a n d G r e e n U r b a n i s m in t h e U n i t e d States

Figure 72. The first Swedish garden suburb at Enskede, Stockholm, developed from 1908. It is now seen as a possible model for future development of Swedish towns and cities. Author.

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from the 1930s provided opportunities for self-building. Influential voices in today's Swedish planning debate have found a model that they see as more sustainable than the car-based, low density, privately developed suburb (or, also typical of the Nordic suburbanization process, the summer cottage that gradually becomes the primary dwelling) or the high-rise transit-based planned satellite (fig. 73). Johan Radberg, for example, has demonstrated that the garden suburban model would actually have required far less land than building high-rise satellites.45 The director of the Swedish Urban Environment Council, Louise Nystrom, has recendy suggested that the garden city may provide the most sustainable and diversified townscape currendy available in Sweden. It is, she has written, "a model for city renewal, for mending the tattered suburbs and peripheries around most city centres.... the Garden City is a model to stop and even reverse dispersal."46 In other parts of Europe, there has been a similar cherishing of earlier national incarnations of the garden city and a rediscovery of their distinctive qualities. Henri Sellier's greatest Parisian cite-jardin, at Suresnes, has been lovingly restored and conserved. In Germany the ambitious 1989-99 IB A (Interna-

We could extend this review further, but enough has been said to show that the garden city idea retains some resonance in Europe, even when it has been partly subsumed within the new discourse of the compact, sustainable city. Paradoxically, the very place where the arguments for the garden city have been pressed most fully, namely Britain, is also where resistance appears strongest. This seems to be because its advocates have been less compromising on the question of density. It also reflects British planning's failure to demonstrate convincingly its capacity to create vibrant and successful compact cities. Until this occurs, any strong formal support for what is still understood as a relatively low density planned decentralist approach seems remote. American readers will recognize in all this some similarities to and differences from their own situation. They will, perhaps, be surprised that their own critical revisiting of garden city ideas via the New Urbanism (and perhaps smart growth, though that term is barely known outside North America) has impinged so little on European policy debates or practice. It would, of course, be wrong to see the New Urbanism simply as a reprise of garden city ideas.48 The movement's avowed ideal of small-town urbanity owes more to John Nolen and Jane Jacobs than to Ebenezer Howard, Raymond Unwin, or Clarence Stein. Yet these broad ideological distinctions, important though they are, are not borne out either in the specific formulations or the actual practice of New Urbanism. The result is that it becomes difficult to differentiate the New Urbanist formula for the suburbs from the garden city mainstream. Such convergent perspectives have certainly dominated understanding of the New Urbanism in England. Peter Hall, for example, has recendy highlighted the American work of Peter Calthorpe. 49 With Colin Ward, he has applied the vision of transit-oriented development to the southeast of England, in an ambitious updating of the Howard

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Figure 74. An example of an early-twentieth-century Ruhr industrial garden village being rehabilitated with a new higher density addition. The project was part of the recent IBA (International Building Exhibition) Emscher Park, intended to renew a declining and degraded heavy industrial region. Schiingelburg, showing gardens to the rear of the older part. Author.

legacy for the twenty-first century.50 Although interesting, this has had litde impact, however. There has also been some urban design interest. Aspects of this approach are evident, for example, in the design of the widely admired regeneration of Hulme, an area of inner Manchester.51 Although the New Urbanists aspire to such applications of their ideas, Hulme is very different from the New Urbanism's main impact, which gives a more urban feel to the suburbs of North America (and, increasingly, of Australia). The final density of this new "urban village" will not be entirely clear until the development is completed. Yet it is obvious that it will be significandy higher than Calthorpe's ideal range of 10-15 dwellings per acre. The median of this range is, of course, broadly the same as British garden city orthodoxy, a figure now seen as being on the low side in Britain, and even more so in continental Europe. As has been shown elsewhere in this book, though, even this figure is higher than the densities of actual developments in the United

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1

Figure 75. Schiingelburg, the newly built section, showing compact garden city principles. Notice the landscaped colliery spoil heap in the background. Author.

States where New Urbanist principles have been applied. Here densities have been far too low to support any significant shift from single use residential to provide local services or, even more damningly, public transit. Density is, in fact, the major obstacle to any widespread embrace of New Urbanist principles in Europe. Nor has there been much serious engagement by the New Urbanists with other aspects of the sustainability agenda.

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We may expect that American practice will probably soon be actively drawing lessons from continental European examples of compact green urbanism, probably some of the same examples as have lately been so admired in Britain.52 Yet, as we have seen, there are still doubts whether most Britons will accept the higher densities and greater infilling implied by the compact city. If this is so in Britain, then it is even more the case in the United States. We may expect the likes of Pordand, Eugene, Davis, Boulder, Seatde (fig. 76), and others to maintain the lead they already have in American green urbanism. But whether the rest of the nation is prepared to follow them very far in this direction must be a more open question.

Figure 76. Urbanizing the suburbs at Redmond in suburban Seattle. New Urbanist principles show a return to some of the principles of building communities that inspired Howard. Author.

Green Urbanism A century after the launch of the second, and most influential, edition of Howard's great book, it is fascinating to speculate what he would have made of these current trends. My own view is that he would see much of the desire for a compact sustainable urbanism as continuing the spirit of his own work. It seems unlikely he would be quite as purist over the density question as some of his disciples. Much has changed that alters the basic assumptions on which he worked. Average family sizes throughout the developed world are much smaller (about half as large in Britain) than when he wrote. It seems unlikely, therefore, that he would be much troubled by compact city residential densities that, at most, are usually only a little higher than he originally advocated. Population densities are invariably lower. Relevant, too, is the complete disappearance from the cities of the developed world of the factory, railway, and domestic coal smoke, which formerly polluted the atmosphere. Bad (and more widespread) though it can be, pollution from motor vehicles has never been quite as awful. Nevertheless, the automobile has clearly changed many assumptions, from the space needed to ac-

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commodate it near the home to its implications for the relationship of home to work and major services. He would probably be sympathetic, however, to the continuing efforts of green urbanists to reduce car dependence, especially for long journeys to work. Against this, though, there would be several causes for disappointment. He would surely regret the general retreat from the idea of creating freestanding new setdements. For all the good qualities of the urban villages and compact expansions, there surely remains scope for places where new thinking can be developed empirically, uncompromised by the constraints of existing cities. Linked with this, he might well regret that regulatory planning systems everywhere in the developed world have so often inhibited the more autonomous, cooperative, and experimental approaches to urban development that he favored. He might well contrast this exclusion with the continued dominance of development capitalism in a land market that everywhere, if to varying degrees, continues to favor private profit above public or community benefit. Though there are variations, his ideal of genuine community ownership of development land seems in most places as far off as ever. Finally, he might well be disappointed that his legacy, however interpreted, has been so unevenly spread across the world. When Howard wrote, London was an obvious starting point for the world's urban problems. Now this is no longer self-evident. Roughly half the world's population, over 3 billion people, currendy lives in urban setdements. By 2025 the proportion may reach 60 percent and the absolute figure 5 billion. Further growth in the urban population of the developed world will be on a small scale, however, so that most of the growth will take place in cities of the developing world. Yet the imbalance of planning effort remains huge. There are a handful of exceptions in a few unusually affluent corners of the developing world, such as Curitiba in Brazil or the "tropical garden city" of Singapore.53 As we might expect, though, the extent of influence of ideas derived from the garden city tradition in the newly urbanizing world is very small. The most telling feature of the Howard legacy is that a majority of the world's city dwellers remain completely disinherited from it.

Notes

Introduction The author is indebted to John A. Andrew HI, Michael Birkner, Robert Freestone, Bruce Stephenson, and Michael Tomlan for their critical reading of an earlier version of this introduction. 1. Information on the publishing history of To-morrow is drawnfromRobert Beevers, The Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard (New York, 1988), p. 57. The glaring exception to the pattern of favorable reviews were those reflecting the opinions of several socialist groups, which tended to reject any colonization schemes and other meliorist reforms. 2. Walter Creese characterized Port Sunlight and George Cadbury's Bournville as "garden villages" in The Searchfor Environment: The Garden City Before and After, expanded ed. (Baltimore, 1992), p. 108. 3. Howard clearly anticipated that the garden city would have international appeal. In 1901 he wrote, "To solve the great problem of the city for England is to solve it for all of Europe, America, Asia, and Africa." Howard is quoted in Stanley Buder, Visionaries & Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community (New York, 1990), p. 133. Mervyn Miller has observed that in the first quarter of the twentieth century "the Garden City became one of the most potent international themes in the emergence of twentieth century city and regional planning." Miller, "Dawn of Internationalism: The Iconography of the Garden City," paper presented at the Ninth International Planning History Conference," Helsinki, Finland, Aug. 20-23, 2000.

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In Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), Daniel T. Rodgers presents the garden city as one of the most influential of the efforts in Europe and the United States to promote better housing and a higher quality of life. He describes Letchworth as "an experiment in single tax economics, comprehensive town planning, and an environment more attractive than either isolated country living or the pressures of great city life" (pp. 178-81). 4. Osborn, preface to Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, ed. F. J. Osborn (1946; Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 10; Mumford, "The Garden City Idea and Modern Planning," in ibid., p. 29. 5. "Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City," ed. Evan D. Richert and Mark B. Lapping, with contributions by Richert, Lapping, Robert Fishman, Stephen V Ward, Kermit C. Parsons, Daniel Schaffer, and Ruth Eckdish Knack, Journal of the American Planning Association 64 (spring 1998): 125-32. 6. Stephen V. Ward, "The Garden City Introduced," in The Garden City: Past, Present and Future, ed. Stephen V. Ward (London, 1992), p. 1. 7. A number of historians have made this point, but see esp. Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1988), pp. 14-31, 87-94; Hall, "Metropolis 1890-1940: Challenges and Responses," in Metropolis 1890-1940, ed. Anthony Sutcliffe (Chicago, 1984), pp. 19-66; Sutcliffe, "Introduction: Urbanization, Planning and the Giant City," in ibid., p. 14. 8. Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, ed. Anthony S. Wohl (Leicester, 1980), pp. 58-61, passim. See also Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, pp. 16-19. 9. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 42. 10. Adna Ferrin Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1899), pp. 1, 46, 240-43, 348, 2, quotations on 1, 348, 2. rr. Lyman Tower Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliography (New York, 1988), passim; John F.Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 (New York, 1976), pp. 183-234. • 12. Howard is quoted in Beevers, Garden City Utopia, p. 27. See also Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), pp. 32-35; DugaldMacFadyen, Sir Ebenezer Howard and the Town Planning Movement (1933; Manchester, U.K., 1970), p. 21. 13. Buder, Visionaries if Planners, pp. 59-61. 14. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, pp. 189-90. See also John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demurest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 237-61. 15. Ruskin, Sesame andLilies (1871), by John Ruskin, quoted in Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 50. 16. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 46. Frederick H. A. Aalen emphasizes the degree to which "Howard's garden city proposals strongly reflect the preoccupations of contemporary reformers with revitalization of rural life and repeopling of the countryside as a means of ameliorating city problems." Aalen, "English Origins," in Ward, The Garden City, p. 48. 17. Peter Hall, in Cities of Tomorrow, has emphasized the attention Howard paid to the practical aspects of the garden city: "Howard was writing not for Utopian simple-lifers, but for hard-nosed Victorian businessmen who wanted to be sure they would get their money back" (pp. 94-96).

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18. Anthony S. Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (Montreal, 1977), pp. 141-78; Roy Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1880-1917 (Pittsburgh, 1962); and Eugenie L. Birch and Deborah Gardner, "The Five Percent Solution: A Review of Philanthropic Housing, 18701910," Journal of Urban History 7 (Aug. 1981): 408-38. 19. Henry George, Progress and Poverty; An Inquiry into the Cause ofIndustrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth. The Remedy (1879; New York, 1942), pp. 3-9, 274-75, 333-37, passim. In To-morrow Howard took issue with some aspects of George's analysis, though he conceded that he had "derived much inspiration from Progress and Poverty." Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 136. 20. Howard described the importance of these sources to his conceptualization of the Garden City in Garden Cities of To-morrow, pp. 118-27. See also Beevers, Garden City Utopia, chap. 2; Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, pp. 27-39; and Standish Meacham, Regaining Paradise: Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement (New Haven, Conn., 1999), pp. 50-52. 21. See, for example, Creese, Search for Environment, and Mervyn Miller, Letchworth: The First Garden City (Chichester, 1989). Standish Meacham's argument—that a "conservative devotion to an English past fueled much of the sentiment generating the garden city movement"—-is more applicable to the Arts and Crafts designs of Unwin and Parker than to Howard and the ideas he expressed in To-morrow. See Meacham, Regaining Paradise, p. 44. 22. Victor Gruen, the Viennese-born architect and planner who revolutionized the design of suburban shopping centers, claimed to have found in Howard's ideas antecedents for his own work: "I found it interesting recendy, while reading Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of To-morrow, to see that he proposed and foresaw not only the regional shopping center but its latest version, the shopping center with completely enclosed pedestrian areas. As one of the features of the new garden city he planned a ringshaped 'Crystal Palace' to serve as a 'shopping center' (he uses this very term)." Gruen, The Heart of Our Cities. The Urban Crisis: Diagnosis and Cure (New York, 1964), p. 195. 23. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, pp. 50-57. 24. Ibid., pp. 50-57, 140-44 (quotation on p. 142); see also Fishman, chap. 3 in this volume. Howard was not the only person advancing the idea of limits to urban growth. Several months before the publication of To-morrow, Warren S. Rehm wrote a pamphlet entitled The Practical City, which anticipated Howard's concept of satellite cities: "There shall be no extension of the Practical City says the charter, but in case of too large a growth, the founding of others of its kind shall be urged and encouraged." The Practical City. A Future City Romance; or A Study in Environment (Lancaster, Pa., 1898), p. 19. 25. Peter Hall observes in Cities of Tomorrow that Howard's garden cities were "vehicles for a progressive reconstruction of capitalistic society into an infinity of co-operative commonwealths" (p. 87). Robert Fishman also notes the degree to which the more radical of Howard's ideas were ignored as the garden city took physical form. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, pp. 79-80. 26. See, for example, Creese, Search for Environment; Miller, Letchworth; and Beevers, Garden City Utopia. 27. This idea is suggested in William Cronon's "The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York, 1995), pp. 69-90. See also John L. Thomas, "Holding the Middle

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Ground," in Robert Fishman, ed., The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy (Washington, D.C., 2000), pp. 38, 56-62. 28. Mumford, "The Garden City Idea and Modern Planning," p. 40. ONE: Ebenezer Howard and His Times

i-iKi

1. Witnessed by Tom Osborn, son of Frederic J. Osborn, a neighbor at number 16 Guessens Road. M. de Soissons, Welwyn Garden City: A Town Designedfor Healthy Living (Cambridge, 1988), p. 70. 2. Notes of interview by F.J. Osborn with Mrs. Berry (Howard's daughter), Dec. 21, 1949,fileI 35, Osborn Collection, Welwyn Garden City Library. 3. Ibid. 4. D. MacFadyen, Sir Ebenezer Howard and The Town Planning Movement (Manchester, U.K., 1933); R. Beevers, The Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard (Basingstoke, 1988). Unless otherwise referenced, material in this chapter is based on these two works and on those in note 6. 5. Particularly F. J. Osborn, preface to E. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (1946; London, 1965), pp. 9-28; and F.J. Osborn, "Sir Ebenezer Howard: The Evolution of His Ideas," Town Planning Review 21 (1950): 221-35. 6. S. Buder, Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community (New York, 1990); R. Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, andLe Corbusier (New York, 1977), pp. 23-88. 7. Typescript notes by F.J. Osborn, file I 5, Osborn Collection, Welwyn Garden City Library; G. P. Scholtz, "Ebenezer Howard in Nebraska," paper delivered to the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning/Association of European Schools of Planning Joint Congress, Oxford Polytechnic, July 8-12,1991. 8. Typescript by Ebenezer Howard, Howard Archive, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, Hertfordshire County Record Office, D/EHo F18/3. 9. Howard Archive, D/EH0F18/4. 10. B. W. Richardson, Hygeia, or the City ofHealth (1876; New York, 1985). 11. H. George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause ofIndustrial Depressions and ofIncrease of Want with Increase of Wealth—The Remedy (New York, 1879). 12. J. Yelling, "Planning and the Land Question," Planning History 16, no 1 (Apr. 1994): 4-9. 13. H. Spencer, Social Statics: Or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, And the First of Them Developed (London, 1851). 14. H. M. Hyndman, ed., The Nationalisation of Land in 1775 and 1882: Being a Lecture Delivered at Newcastle/Tyne by Thomas Spence 1775 (London, 1882). 15. E. G. Wakefield, The Art of Colonisation (London, 1849). 16. J. S. Buckingham, National Evils and Practical Remedies (London, 1849). 17. E. Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (Boston, 1888); Howard Archive, D/ EHo F18/6. 18. Howard Archive, D/EHo F1/5. 19. Ibid.,F3/8. 20. Buder, Visionaries and Planners, pp. 57-63. 21. Howard Archive, D/EHo F3/2. 22. Morris, News from Nowhere (1890), reproduced in A. Briggs, ed., William Morris:

Notes to Pages 20-40

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Selected Writings and Designs (Harmondsworth, 1962), pp. 183-301. Pro-Chicago opinions on the origins of Howard's use of the term garden city can be found in Osborn, preface to Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 26 (who also mentions Howard's denial), and Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1988), p. 89. Some commentators have made an even more specific connection between Riverside, the sylvan Chicago suburb designed in 1868-69 by Frederick Law Olmsted, and Howard's concept of the garden city; see, for example, A. Garvin, The American City: WhatWorks, What Doesn't (New York, 1996)^. 315. Although Howard cites many other influences, none of these asserted connections are actually mentioned in Howard's writings. The case for William Morris as inventor of the term is given by M. Naslas, "The Concept of the Town in the Writings of William Morris," paper presented at the History of Planning Group Meeting, Birmingham, U.K., Mar. 1977. 23. Howard Archive, D/EHo Fi 8/8. 24. Howard, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London, 1898). 25. Beevers, Garden City Utopia, p. 150. 26. Howard, To-morrow, p 86. 27. J. Birchall, "Co-partnership Housing and the Garden City Movement," Planning Perspectives 10, no 4 (1995): 329-58. 28. P. Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899; London, 1974). 29. Howard Archive, D/EHo F3/2/10. 30. Cited in Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (London, 1902), p. 6. 31. Dennis Hardy, From Garden Cities to New Towns: Campaigning for Town and Country Planning, 1899-1946 (London, 1991), pp. 16-35.1 have drawn widely on this work in the remaining portion of this chapter. 32. "Osborn's Afterthoughts on E. H.," Osborn Collection,file11, p. 8. 33. MacFadyen, Sir Ebenezer Howard, pp. 25-26; Hardy, From Garden Cities to New Towns, pp. 16-19. 34. J. Hyder, The Case for Land Nationalisation. (London, 1913). 35. Birchall, "Co-partnership Housing." 36. Mervyn Miller, Letchworth: The First Garden City (Chichester, 1989); Miller, Raymond Unwin: Garden Cities and Town Planning (Leicester, 1992). 37. Hardy, From Garden Cities to New Towns, p. 36. 38. "New Townsmen" (E. Howard, F. J. Osborn, C. B. Purdom, and W. G. Taylor), New Towns after the War (London, 1918). 39. F. J. Osborn, The Genesis of Welwyn Garden City: Some Jubilee Memories (London, 1970); C. B. Purdom, Life Over Again (London, 1951), pp. 64-66; de Soissons, Welwyn Garden City, pp. 34-35; R. Filler, A History of Welwyn Garden City (Chichester, 1986), pp. 9-17. 40. Elizabeth Howard to Ebenezer Howard, Oct. 8, 1904 (typescript copy of letter), Osborn Collection. TWO : Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes 1. Robert Beevers, The Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard (London, 1988) p. 98. 2. Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (New York, 1977).

"TT

250

Notes to Pages 40-42

3. One can read Stephen Ward's comments on Howard and the garden cities movement this way. See "The Garden City Introduced," in Stephen V. Ward, ed., The Garden City: Past, Present and Future (New York, 1992), pp. 1-26. The idea that initially comprehensive and profound radical ideas for the reconstruction of community and society tend to get assimilated and reduced for lack of a theory is a very general one, particularly for the United States. "Consensus historians" celebrated this tendency; others mourned it. See, on the one side, Louis.Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York, 1955). On the other side a notable statement was that of Christopher Lasch, The Agony ofthe American Left (New York, 1969): feminist, agrarian, labor, and civil rights movements all became assimilated for lack of a cohesive theory or ideology. 4. The best recent biography of Geddes is Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner (London, 1990). See also P. Kitchen, A Most Unsettling Person: An Introduction to the Life and Ideas of Patrick Geddes (London, 1975); and Philip Boardman, The Worlds of Patrick Geddes: Biologist, Town Planner, Re-Educator, Peace Warrior (London, 1978). Earlier biographical treatments of Geddes's work include Philip Boardman, Patrick Geddes: Maker of the Future (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944); and Philip Mairet, Pioneer of Sociology: The Life and Letters of Patrick Geddes (London, 1957).. Geddes's own work is available in a number of relatively obscure and inaccessible articles and pamphlets and in two collections, which have appeared in book form. The most complete bibliography appears in Philip Boardman, L'Oeuvre Educatrice de Patrick Geddes (Montpellier, France, 1936). The collections of Geddes's own work are Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, ed., Patrick Geddes in India (London, 1947); and OudookTower Association, ed., Cities in Evolution (London, 1949). 5. Kropotkin arrived in London in 1881, attracting support for a set of ideas about cooperation. John Stuart Mill made cooperatives a feature of his writings on political economy. Beevers, Garden City Utopia, pp. 17, 25. 6. Howard, in Garden Cities of To-morrow, conceded: "Probably the chief cause of failure in former social experiments has been a misconception of the principal element in the problem-—human nature itself. The degree of strain which average human nature will bear in an altruistic direction has not been duly considered by those who have essayed the task of suggesting new forms of social organizations" (p. 113). Citations are to the slightly revised Garden Cities of To-morrow (1946; Cambridge, Mass., 1965). This was originally published in 1902. 7. Howard on labor, cited in Beevers, Garden City Utopia, p. 67: "The true remedy for capitalist oppression where it exists, is not the strike of no work, but the strike of true work, and against this last blow the oppressor has no weapon. If labour leaders spend half the energy in cooperative organization that they now waste in co-operative disorganization, the end of the present unjust system would be at hand. In Garden City such leaders will have a fair field for the exercise of pro-municipal functions." To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London, 1898), p. 86. 8. Beevers, Garden City Utopia, p. 26. 9. Beevers mentions particularly an address by George in 1882. Garden City Utopia, p. 17. 10. Beevers describes Howard's ideas on cooperative management and democracy in chap. 5; and he cites Richardson's work on p. 7 as published in London in 1876. n . Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, pp. 4, 19.

Notes to Pages 42-54

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12. Beevers, Garden City Utopia, p. 31. Howard's comment is in an unpublished manuscript: E. Howard, "Commonsense Socialism," ms. 1892, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, Hertfordshire County Archive, EHo, F. 10. 13. Howard, To-morrow. 14. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, pp. 44-46. 15. Beevers, Garden City Utopia, pp. 94-95. The quote is taken from C. B. Purdom, The Garden City (London, 1913), appendix A, p. 216. Note, though, that it was not until the latter half of the century that banks generally began to accept common land ownership schemes such as cooperatives, condominiums, and land trusts. 16. Beevers, Garden City Utopia, p. 90. 17. On later garden city developments in the United States and Britain, see generally Ward, The Garden City. 18. Ward, Fishman, and Beevers, cited above, are exceptions. 19. Geddes, "Civics: As Applied Sociology," Sociological Papers 1 (1904): 103-44; Geddes, "Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology," Sociological Papers 2 (1905): 57-119. One might also note, since Geddes conceived it as part of the same series, "A Suggested Plan for a Civic Museum," Sociological Papers 3 (1906): 197-240. 20. On the general point, see Ira Katznelson, Marxism and the City (New York, 1992), chap. 1. 21. Geddes, "Civics: As Applied Sociology," p. 105. 22. Ibid. 23. Meller, Patrick Geddes, chap. 2. The "Civics" articles do not give a complete idea of this concept. Geddes made many statements of it, however. One is contained in Cities in Evolution. 24. Geddes, "Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology," p. 72 25. Ibid., pp. 80-81. 26. Ibid., p. 72, 73. 27. Ibid., p. 80. 28. Katznelson, Marxism and the City. 29. Geddes is explicidy not "socialist," though. In several places he argues against ideas of class consciousness. He thinks the valley section and the occupation types are the bases of consciousness that are consistent with the more basic forces of evolution. Class arguments, he suggests, lead to narrowing of views and preclude the shifts he has in mind. See his 1888 pamphlet Cooperation vs. Socialism (Manchester, U.K., 1988); Geddes, "On the Conditions of Progress of the Capitalist and of the Labourer," in John Burnett, et al., The Claims of Labour (Edinburgh, 1886), pp. 74-111. 30. Meller, Patrick Geddes, notes that in a comment on Geddes's Dunfermline plan, Howard "was highly appreciative though there may have been a barb in his comment that a copy of the report should be in every public library" (p. 168). The quotation cites Geddes Papers, MS 10536, National Library of Scodand, Edinburgh, Oct. 1904. 31. Geddes, "Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology," pp. 92-93. 32. See Patrick Geddes, City Development: A Study ofParks, Gardens and Culture Institutes (Edinburgh, 1904). 33. Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York, 1978). 34. Meller, Patrick Geddes, describes Geddes's difficulties in this respect (pp. 166-70). 35. Meller, Patrick Geddes, describes Geddes' efforts to establish the methodology of

252

Notes to Pages 55-65

the regional survey as central to town planning and the incomplete way it was taken up (pp. 179-82). 36. Robert Fishman, "The American Garden City: Still Relevant?" in Ward, The Garden City, pp. 146-64. 37. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York, 1961), pp. 563-64. 38. Neither Howard nor Geddes had much taste for class conflict, the labor movement, or Marxism. Beevers comments on the failed connection between Howard and the Fabians (and labor): "The [Fabian] Society continued to cold-shoulder the movement. In doing so, it not only deprived itself of the opportunity to influence the course of events at Letchworth and in the garden city movement generally; it effectively reinforced Howard's tendency to look to liberal opinion for his support rather than to the socialist left even of the more moderate kind." Beevers, Garden City Utopia, p. 71. He could have said something similar about Geddes. THREE: The Bounded City 1. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, the Story of Carol Kennicutt (New York, 1920), p. 381. 2. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise ofSprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York, 2000), esp. chap. 10, "How to Make a Town." 3. For a more extended discussion of Howard's debts to Marshall and George, see part 1 of my Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (New York, 1977). 4. C. B. Purdom, The Garden City: A Study in the Development ofa Modern Town (London, 1913), pp. 41-55. 5. Graham Taylor, Satellite Cities: A Study of Industrial Suburbs (New York, 1915). 6. Alexander von Hoffman, Local Attachments: The Making ofan Urban Neighborhood, 1850-1920 (Baltimore, 1994). 7. Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America (New York, 1995). 8. Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore, 1997). 9. Lewis Mumford, "The Garden City Idea and Modern Planning," introductory essay (dated 1945) to Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, ed. F.J. Osborn (1946; Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 34. 10. Michael Hughes, ed., The Letters ofLewis Mumford and Frederic J. Osborn: A Transatlantic Dialogue, 1938-1970 (New York, 1971), pp. 341-42. II. Ibid., p. 274. 12. Ibid., pp. 274-75. 13. Ibid., p. 229. 14. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York, 1961), p. 116. 15. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961; New York, 1992), p. 19. 16. Indeed, Bacon made his very argument at the Cornell conference in response to my paper and others.

Notes to Pages 66-73

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17. Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community and the American Dream (Princeton, N.J., 1993). See also Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton, The Regional City (Washington, D.C., 2001). 18. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 48, italics in original. FOUR: Greenbelts in City and Regional Planning My thanks to Jamie Erken, Alison Heller, Kendal Mackay, Neal McCarry, and Pascal Van De Walle,formerplanning students at the University of New South Wales, for their research assistance, and also to David Schuyler for his comments on an earlier version of this paper presented as "Issues of Environmental Quality and the Greenbelt: A History" at the "Garden Cities to Green Cities" conference. 1. Martin Elson, Green Belts: Conflict Mediation in the Urban Fringe (London, 1986); L. Grayson, ed., Green Belt, Green Fields and the Urban Fringe: The Pressures on Land in the 1980s: A Guide to Sources (London, 1990); Peter Hall, Urban and Regional Planning, 3rd ed. (London, 1992); D. R. Mandelker, Green Belts and Urban Growth: English Town and Country Planning in Anion (Madison, Wis., 1962); R. C. Munton, London's Green Belt: Containment in Practice (London, 1983); F. J. Osborn, Green-Belt Cities: The British Contribution (London, 1946); David Thomas, London's Green Belt (London, 1970). 2. Peter Hall, Harry Gracey, Roy Drewett, and Ray Thomas, The Containment of Urban England (London, 1973); quotation in Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, ed. F.J. Osborn (1946; Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 140. 3. F.J. Osborn, "The Country-Belt Principle: Its Historical Origins," Town and Country Planning 13 (spring 1945): 10-19; R- Home, OfPlanting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities (London, 1997); John W. Reps, "The Green Belt Concept," Town and Country Planning 28 Quly i960): 246-50; [T. J. Maslen], The Friend of Australia, or A Plan for Exploring the Interior, and for Carrying on a Survey of the Whole Continent ofAustralia (London, 1830); Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, SocialPower and Environment (London, 1976). 4. Raymond Bunker, "Process and Product in the Foundation and Laying Out of Adelaide," Planning Perspectives 13 (Juty 1998): 251. 5. Jim Daly, Decisions and Disasters: Alienation of the Adelaide Parklands (Adelaide, 1987); Michael Williams, The Making ofthe South Australian Landscape: A Study in the Historical Geography ofAustralia (London, 1974). 6. Hall, Urban and Regional Planning. 7. Rutherford Piatt, ed., The Ecological City: Preserving and Restoring Urban Biodiversity (Amherst, 1994), p. 58; F. H. Aalen, "English Origins," in Stephen V. Ward, ed., The Garden City: Past, Present and Future (London, 1992), pp. 28-51; Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, pp. 46-48, passim. 8. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 142. 9. Thomas Adams, Garden City and Agriculture: How to Solve the Problem of Rural Depopulation (Letchworth, 1905); Aalen, "English Origins"; Mervyn Miller, Letchworth: The First Garden City (Chichester, 1989); Michael Simpson, "Thomas Adams 1871-1940," in G. E. Cherry, ed., Pioneers in British Planning (London, 1981), p. 21. 10. Aalen, "English Origins." n . Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice (London, 1909), p. 163.

254

Notes to Pages 74 - 79

12. Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning & Design in the Twentieth Century, rev. ed. (Oxford, 1996); Robert Freestone, Model Communities: The Garden City Movement in Australia (Melbourne, 1989), p. 207. 13. Mervyn Miller, Raymond Unwin: Garden Cities and Town Planning (Leicester, 1992). 14. Charles Reade, Planning and Development of Towns and Cities in South Australia (Adelaide, 1919). 15. Miller, Raymond Unwin, p. 206. 16. Hall, et al., Containment of Urban England; Helen Meller, Towns, Plans and Society in Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1997), p. 56. 17. Cynthia L. Girling and Kenneth I. Helphand, Yard Street Park: The Design ofSuburban Open Space (New York, 1994). 18. Cynthia Zaitzevsky, Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston Park System (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore, 1986); Charles E. Little, Greenways for America (Baltimore, 1995), p. 161. 19. William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore, 1989), pp. 147-67; Miller, Raymond Unwin. 20. Suzanne Mulder, "Cologne 1923: Generalstedkungsplan," in Koos Bosma and Helma Hellinga, eds., Mastering the City: North-European City Planning 1900-2000, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1997), 2:192-99. 21. Girling and Helphand, Yard Street Park. 22. Hall, et al., Containment of Urban England. 23. Thomas Sharp, Town and Countryside (Oxford, 1932), p. 172; Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History (London, 1991), p. 195. 24. Clarence S. Stein, Toward New Towns for America (Cambridge, Mass., 1957); Litde, Greenways for America, p. 17. 25. Hall, et al., Containment of Urban England, p. 56. 26. Robert Freestone, "Sydney's Green Belt 1945-1960," Australian Planner 30 (July 1992): 70-77. 27. Sigurd Grava, "The Urban Heritage of the Soviet Regime: The Case of Riga, Latvia," Journal ofthe American Planning Association 59 (winter 1993): 9-29; Michael Mattingley, "Urban Management Intervention in Land Markets," in Nick Devas and Carole Rakodi, eds., Managing Fast Growing Cities: New Approaches to Urban Planning and Management in the Developing World (Harlow, U.K., 1993); Stephen Ward, "Re-exainiriing the International Diffusion of Planning," in Robert Freestone, ed., Urban Planning in a Changing World: The Twentieth Century Experience (London, 2000), pp. 40-60; J. Kim, "Urban Redevelopment of Green Belt Villages: A Case Study of Seoul," Cities 7 (Nov. 1990): 323-32; C-M. Lee, "An Intertemporal Efficiency Test of a Greenbelt: Assessing the Economic Impacts of Seoul's Greenbelt," Journal of Planning Education and Research 19 (fall 1999): 41-52. 28. Barry Cullingworth and Vincent Nadin, Town and Country Planning in Britain (London, 1997), p. 153; Hall, Urban and Regional Planning. 29. Meller, Towns, Plans and Society in Modern Britain; quotation in N. Moor and F. Stafford, "Planning Policy in Green Belts," Architects Journal 199 (Apr. 1994): 22; Y. Rydin and G. Myerson, "Explaining and Interpreting Ideological Effects: A Rhetorical Ap-

Notes to Pages 81-90

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proach to Green Belts," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 7 (Dec. 1989): 463 78. 30. Robert Holden, "Post-Industrial Landscapes: London and the Aesthetics of Current British Urban Planning," Built Environment 21, no 1 (1995): 35~4431. Elson, Green Belts; M. Elson, S. Walker and R. Macdonald, The Effectiveness of Green Belts (London, 1993). 32. A. W Evans, The Economics of Residential Location (London, 1973). 33. Elson, Walker, and Macdonald, Effectiveness of Green Belts. 34. Peter Self, "The Evolution of the Greater London Plan, 1944-1970," paper delivered to the "Seizing the Moment: London Planning, 1944-1994" conference, University of East London, 1994. 35. Jon Lang, Urban Design: The American Experience (New York, 1994). 36. Ibid., p. 348. 37. Mervyn Miller, Letchworth. 38. J. Simmie, S. Olsberg and C. Tunnell, "Urban Containment and Land Use Planning," Land Use Policy 9 (1992): 36-46. 39. Reade, Planning and Development of Towns and Cities in South Australia; Thomas Adams, "Reserving Productive Areas within and around Cities: A Proposal to Substitute Agricultural Wedges for Zones," Journal of the American Institute of Architects 9 (Oct. r92i): 316-19. 40. Patrick Abercrombie, Town and Country Planning, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1943), p. 147; Self, "The Evolution of the Greater London Plan." 41. William H. Whyte, The Last Landscape (Garden City, N.Y., 1968), p. 12. 42. Kermit C. Parsons, ed., The Writings of Clarence S. Stein: Architect of the Planned Community (Baltimore, 1998), pp. 481-82. 43. G. Dix, "Little Plans and Noble Diagrams," Town Planning Review 49 Quly 1978): 334-3544. Clarence S. Stein, "A Regional Pattern for Dispersal," Architectural Record 136 (Sept. 1964): 205 (Piedmont quotations); Clarence S. Stein, "City Patterns . . . Past and Future," New Pencil Points 23 (June 1942): 53, 54; Stein, Toward New Towns for America, p. 225 ("Green Cities" quotation). 45. Peter Harrison, "Canberra—Case Notes on a New Town," in Planning 1965: Selected Papersfromthe Joint Planning Conference of the American Society of Planning Officials and the Community Planning Association of Canada (Toronto, 1965), pp. 269-78; quotation in Parsons, Writings of Clarence S. Stein, p. 226; Stein, Toward New Towns for America; Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy, Towards a More Sustainable Canberra (Perth, 1991). 46. Little, Greenways for America; Daniel S. Smith, "An Overview of Greenways: Their History, Ecological Context, and Specific Functions," in Daniel S. Smith and Paul Cawood Hellmund, eds., Ecology of Greenways (Minneapolis, 1993); "Greenways," special issue of Landscape and Urban Planning 33, nos. 1-3 (Oct. 1995). 47. Littie, Greenways for America; Ulrike Pongratz, "Frankfurt Green Belt: A Vision of Green Open Spaces," Anthos 31, no. 2 (1992): 28-33. 48. National Capital Commission, A Capital in the Making: Reflections of the Past, Visions of the Future (Ottawa, 1991); quotation in R. Scott, "Canada's Capital Greenbelt: Reinventing a 1950s Plan," Plan Canada 36, no. 4 (1996): 20; Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation, Report and Accounts (Letchworth, 1997).

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Notes to Pages 91-102

49. Girling and Helphand, Yard Street Park. 50. Thomas Daniels, When City and Country Collide: Managing Growth in the Metropolitan Fringe (Washington, D.C., 1999). 51. Carl Abbott, "The Politics of'Good Planning' in Portland, Oregon," in Robert Freestone, ed., The Twentieth Century Urban Planning Experience: Proceedings of the 8th International Planning [History] Society Conference and 4th Australian Planning/Urban History Conference (Sydney, 1998), pp. 1-6; Daniels, When City and Country Collide. 52. Greater Vancouver Regional District, Livable Region Strategic Plan (Vancouver, 1996). 53. Klaus R. Kunzmann, "The Future of the City Region in Europe," in Bosma and Hellinga, eds., Mastering the City, r:22, 26; Robert Fishman, "The Garden City Tradition in the Post-Suburban Age," Built Environment 17, nos. 3-4 (1991): 233-41. 54. Fishman, "The Garden City Tradition in the Post-Suburban Age"; Hall, Cities of Tomorrow. 55. Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community and the American Dream (New York, 1993). 56. Michael Breheny and Ralph Rookwood, "Planning the Sustainable City Region," in Andrew Blowers, ed., Planningfor a Sustainable Environment (London, 1993), pp. 1508957. Dennis Hardy, "The Garden City Campaign: An Overview," in Ward, ed., The Garden City, p. 205. 58. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 159. FIVE: Origins of the Garden City Residential Neighborhood 1. Adams had been secretary of the Garden City Association under Howard and estate manager at Letchworth, a postfromwhich he resigned in 1906. He subsequendy became a successful consultant, developing connections on both sides of the Adantic. His 1923 appointment to the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environsfollowedconsideration of Unwin for the post. See M. Simpson, Thomas Adams and the Modern Planning Movement (London, 1985). See also C. A. Perry, "The Neighborhood Unit," in Neighborhood and Community Planning (New York, 1929), pp. 30-31, 34-46, 88-100, 113-14, 123. This was volume 7 of Regional Survey of New York and Its Environs, 8 vols. (New York, 1927-31). 2. Walter Creese, The Search for Environment: The Garden City Before and After (New Haven, Conn., 1966), pp. 169-70. 3. The most comprehensive gazetteer of model villages and Utopian settlements is given in G. Darley, Villages of Vision (London, 1975). The ties to the garden city movement were explored in Creese, Search for Environment, chaps. 2 and 3. 4. For a useful discussion of "designed villages," with a comprehensive gazetteer, see Darley, Villages of Vision. 5. For a discussion of this seminal work, which profoundly influenced Morris, among many other late-nineteenth-century intellectuals, see E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, rev. ed. (London, 1977), pp. 33-38. 6. Howard chose an extract, starting at "thorough sanitary and remedial action" to place at the head of chapter 1 of Garden Cities of To-morrow (London, 1902), p. 20. Mumford included a fuller extract, without attribution, for his City in History (1961; Harms-

Notes to Pages 102-107

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worth, 1966), p. 540). The original appeared in the 1868 version of Ruskin's lecture and was published in the "revised and enlarged" or "works" edition (1871), which included a third lecture, "Of the Mystery of Life," which did not appear in earlier editions of Sesame and the Lilies. See E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, eds., The Works ofJohn Ruskin, 39 vols. (London, 1903-12), 17:183-84. 7. For a detailed account of Unwin's formative years and his close relationship with Carpenter, see Mervyn Miller, Raymond Unwin: Garden Cities and Town Planning (Leicester, 1992), chap. 2. 8. Originally published in installments in CommonwealfromJanuary 11 to October 4, 1890, thefirstauthorized edition of Morris's NewsfromNowhere was published by Reeves and Turner in 1891. 9. Morris, "'Art and Socialism': The Aims and Ideas of the English Socialist of Today," a lecture delivered before the Secular Society of Leicester, Jan. 23,1884. Itwas published in Mary Morris, ed., The Collected Works of William Morris, 24 vols. (London, i9ro15), 23-^27. ro. Raymond Unwin, "Sutton Hall," Commonweal 5 (June T5, 1889): 190. 11. Miller, Raymond Unwin, p. 24. 12. Ibid, p. 23. 13. Osborn to Mumford, Aug. 31,1966, in M.Hughes, ed., The Letters ofLewis Mumford and Frederic Osborn: A Transatlantic Dialogue (Bath, 1971), p. 405. In interviews with the author in 1976 and 1977, Osborn always emphasized this point. 14. Published by Swan Sonnenschein. Howard's drafts are in the Howard Papers, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, Hertfordshire County Record Office, D/ EHo. 15. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, edited, with a preface by F. J. Osborn and an introductory essay by Lewis Mumford (London, 1946), p. 71. Although Howard never used the term neighborhood unit, in preparing the index for this reissue of Garden Cities of To-morroW in 1946, Osborn characterized the "ward" in parentheses as "Neighbourhood Units." 16. C. B. Purdom, The Building ofSatellite Towns, new ed. (London, 1949), p. 408. The original 1925 edition did not contain this material. 17. Creese, Search for Environment, discusses both communities in his evolutionary survey of nineteenth-century model communities. See also E. Hubbard and M. Shippobottom, A Guide to Port Sunlight Village (Liverpool, 1988); and M. Harrison, Bournville: Model Village to Garden Suburb (Chichester, 1999). 18. For discussion see Miller, Raymond Unwin, chaps. 2, 3, 4. 19. Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, The Art of Building a Home (London, 1901), pp. 91-108. The concept had originally appeared under Unwin's sole authorship as "Cooperation in Building," Architects' Magazine 1 (Dec. 1900): 20; and 1 (Jan. 1901): 37-38. A copy was pasted into Howard's Garden City Association press cuttings book by Thomas Adams. 20. Parker and Unwin, The Art of Building a Home, pp. 92-93. For discussion of the evolution of Unwin's early concepts into the plans for New Earswick, see Miller, Raymond Unwin, pp. 35-45. 21. Parker and Unwin, The Art ofBuilding a Home, pp. 98, 101. 22. Ibid., p. 103. 23. Ibid., pp. 103-7. The Parker and Unwin practice records in First Garden City

258

Notes to Pages 107-124

Heritage Museum, Letchworth, record the scheme for an unidentified site in Bradford, West Yorkshire. 24. Raymond Unwin, Cottage Plans and Common Sense, Fabian Society Tract no. 109 (London, 1902). For discussion of the evolution from Unwin's earlier (unbuilt) Cooperative Quadrangle for a Bradford site (The Art of Building a Home, pp. 102-8), see Miller, Raymond Unwin, pp. 29-34. 25. The scheme appears to have been commissioned by W. A. Holmes of Harrogate, for whom Parker and Unwin also designed a large house, "The Gables." Bylaw drawings for both projects are in the Parker Collection, First Garden City Heritage Museum, Letchworth. Cottages near a Town was published as a booklet and as pp. 34-43 of Catalogue of the Northern Artworkers' Guild Exhibition (Manchester, U.K., 1903). 26. Miller, Raymond Unwin, chap. 3. 27. Ibid., chap. 4; see also Mervyn Miller, Letchworth: The First Garden City (Chichester, 1989), pp. 46-53. 28. C. B. Purdom, Building ofSatellite Towns, p. 408. 29. Miller, Raymond Unwin, pp. 71-77; Miller, Letchworth, pp. 68-73. 30. Unwin, Town Planning in Practice (London, 1909). The book was translated into German and French, and the original English text remained in print until 1932. 31. Ibid., p. 290. Birds Hill and Pixmore were illustrated in ills. 267 and 268, pp. 34849. 32. Miller, Raymond Unwin, chap. 5; M. Miller and A. S. Gray, Hampstead Garden Suburb (Chichester, 1992), chaps. 4 and 5. 33. Hampstead Garden Suburb Archives, now held by London Metropolitan Archives. 34. Thomas Adams, Recent Advances in Town Planning (London, 1932), p. 299. Adams included extensive discussion of the concept in his American publication, The Design of Residential Areas (Cambridge, Mass., 1934). 35. Raymond Unwin, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding; or How the Garden City Type of Development May Benefit Both the Owner and Occupier (London, 1912), pp. 1, 3. 36. Miller, Raymond Unwin, pp. 46-47. 37. Mervyn Miller, "Raymond Unwin and the Planning of Dublin," in M. J. Bannon, ed., The Emergence ofIrish Planning (Dublin, 1985), pp. 263-305. 38. Raymond Unwin, "Roads and Streets," Town Planning Review 5 (Apr. 1914): 313939. Raymond Unwin, "The Town Extension Plan," in Old Towns and New Needs; Also the Town Extension Plan: Being the Warburton Lectures for 1912 (Manchester, U.K., 1912), P-4540. J. H. Forshaw and P. Abercrombie, County ofLondon Plan (London, 1943), pp. 2529; see also Abercrombie, Greater London Plan 1944 (London, 1945), pp. 111-17. The concept of community was to be strengthened through neighborhood unit planning. 41. "Garden Cities in England," a detailed account of Unwin's lecture, is contained in the City Club Bulletin (Chicago) 4 (June 1911). 42. Drummond's work was highlighted in "Origins of the Neighbourhood Unit Concept," paper presented by Professor D. L. Johnson at "Twentieth Century Urban Planning Experience," a conference hosted by the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, July 15-18, 1998.

Notes to Pages 125-132

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43. M. de Soissons, Welwyn Garden City: A Town Designed for Healthy Living (Cambridge, 1988). 44. Barry Parker, "Economy in Estate Development," Journal ofthe Town Planning Institute 14 Quly 1928): 177-86; Barry Parker, "Highways, Parkways and Freeways with Special Reference to the Wythenshawe Estate, Manchester, and to Letchworth Garden City," Town and Country Planning 1 (Feb. 1933): 38-43. See also Creese, Search for Environment, chap. 1. 45. Lewis Mumford in conversation with the author, Amenia, New York, June 1978. 46. Clarence S. Stein, Toward New Towns for America (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 19, 44. 47. Raymond Unwin to Christy Booth (cousin), Sept. 1928, Miller Collection, quoted in Miller, Raymond Unwin, p. 226. 48. The report was published as "Economy in Estate Development" (quotations on pp. 184, 182-83). 49. Parker, "Highways, Parkways and Freeways," p. 41. 50. The neighborhoods are clearly shown on Parker's 1930-31 plan, Parker Collection, First Garden City Heritage Museum, Letchworth, and on the maps published in R. Nicholas, City ofManchester Plan (Norwich, 1945), chap. 14. 51. Creese, Search for Environment, p. 270. s i x : British and American Community Design This essay was originally published in Planning Perspectives 7 (Apr. 1992): 181-210. The editors are grateful to Taylor & Francis (www.tandf.co.uk), and E & FN SPON, pubUshers of Planning Perspectives, for permission to include the text and illustrations in this collection. The editors have updated severalfiguresand references for this publication. 1. Unwin's housing work with Barry Parker began at Letchworth Garden City in 1903-4 and at New Earswick, York, the garden village they designed in 1905 for Sir Joseph Rowntree. They were the planners of Letchworth New Town and Hempstead Garden Suburb. Unwin was a longtime friend of Stein; he visited him in America in 192 5 at the international conference on housing and town planning held in New York and again in 1934 when he taught in the new graduate program in city and regional planning at Columbia University. 2. Clarence S. Stein, "The Influence of Letchworth in America," unpublished note, June 23, 1953, in Clarence Stein Papers, Collection 3600, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (hereafter Stein Papers). Stein wrote of Letchworth's plan, "(T|t did not altogether work. People and vehicles didn't seem to movefromrailroad station to houses and elsewhere as they should have. The center has . . . been somewhat stranded." 3. Roy Lubove,-Communiiy Planning in the 1920s: The Contribution ofthe Regional Planning Association of America (Pittsburgh, 1963); Edward K. Spann, Designing Modern America: The Regional Planning Association ofAmerica and Its Members (Columbus, Ohio, 1996). The RPAAs members included, in addition to Stein, Lewis Mumford, Wright, Frederick Ackerman, Charles Whitaker, Edith Elmer Wood, Robert Bruere, Stuart Chase, Benton MacKaye, Robert Kohn, Alexander Bing, and later Carol Aronovici, Charles Ascher, Catherine Bauer, and Henry Churchill.

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Notes to Pages 132-139

4. Eugenie L. Birch, "Radburn and the American Planning Movement: The Persistence of an Idea," Journal ofthe American Planning Association 46 (Oct. 1980): 424-39; and K. C. Parsons, "Clarence Stein and the Greenbelt Towns: Settling for Less," ibid. 60 (spring 1990): 161-83. The term Manhattan transfer wasfirstpopularized in John Dos Passos's trilogy USA. It is also the name of a popular singing group. 5. Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice (London, 1909), pp. 115-39. Unwin used footpaths to give secondary access in New Earswick and in Hampstead Garden Suburb and common allotment garden and recreation space as others had provided in residential terraces in Notting Hill, London. 6. Daniel Schaffer's Garden Cities for America: The Radburn Experience (Philadelphia, 1982) provides the single best historical account of the origins and development of Radburn and of the failure to complete it. Clarence Stein's book Toward New Townsfor America (Liverpool, 1951) was widely read by American and European planners in the 1950s and 1960s. See Parsons, "Clarence Stein and the Greenbelt Towns," for a detailed account of Stein's seminal influence on the layout of Greenbelt, Maryland. 7. Mumford's Culture of Cities (New York, 1938) probably provided thefirstpublished description and evaluation of the Radburn plan available to British planners. 8. George Atkinson, "Radburn Layout in Britain: A User Study," Official Architecture and Planner 29 (Mar. 1966): 380. 9. Stein to Aline MacMahon, Jan. 12, 1935, Stein Papers. 10. See Ritter's series of nine articles, "Radburn Planning: A Reassessment," in the Architect's Journalbetween November i960 and February 1961; Ritter also reports on the work of Ling and Wilson. 11. "Towards New TownsforAmerica," Town Planning Review 20 (Oct. 1949): 20582; and ibid. 20 Qan. 1950): 319-418. 12. Gordon Stephenson to Stein, Mar. 8, 1949, Stein Papers. Stephenson left the Ministry of Town and Country Planning in 1945 to become the Leverhulme Professor of Civic Design at Liverpool. 13. Lewis Mumford, "Planning for the Phases of Life," Town Planning Review 2o(Apr. 1949): 4-16. 14. Bauer's article, "Economic Progress and Living Conditions—An Agreement for Regional Planning and Urban Dispersal in Developing Countries with Limited Resources," appeared in Town Planning Review 24 (Jan. 1954)15. See reviews by Holford in the Town Planning Review 22 (Oct. 1951): 269-72; and by F.J. Osborn, ibid. 22 (Apr. 1951): 44-49. 16. C. Holliday to Stein, Sept. 15,1950, Stein Papers. Stephenson later wrote of this collaboration in "Architecture, Town Planning and Civic Designs," Town Planning Review 56 (Apr. 1985): 155-57. 17. Stephenson to Stein, Nov. 17, 1950; Feb. 23, 1951, Stein Papers. Stephenson reported that the Corporation Board had "agreed [to the plan] in principle despite vigorous protests by one or two members who wanted a bus stop in front of every shop." 18. The Stevenage Development Corporation, Stevenage Master Plan (1966), p. 61. 19. D. Rigby Childs, "New Town Reports 1954," Journal of the Town Planning Institute (Mar. 1955): 106. 20. Stein wrote an eleven-page description of the main ideas. The proposed town center plan for Stevenage is dated September 3,1958, and a copy of it is in the Stein Papers.

Notes to Pages 139-150

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The existence of this document suggests that he may have been involved in preparing the i955-5 6 P lan 21. F. Osborn and A. Whittick, The New Towns, Answer to Megalopolis (London, 196 3), p. 12. 22. Stein to Stephenson, Sept. 5, 1950, Stein Papers; see also note 20, above. 23. Stephenson to Stein, Nov. 15, 1951, Stein Papers. 24. See Stephenson's article, "The Wrexham Experiment," Town Planning Review 24 (Jan. 1954): 271-95. Stephenson wrote to Stein that he believed that they would "make considerable reductions in cost" but expressed concern that "an enormous amount of energy is used up to move people from orthodox views." Stephenson to Stein, Nov. 15,1951, Stein Papers. 25. In "Saving Housing Costs," Manchester Guardian, Dec. 11, 1952, the local government correspondent praised "Wrexham's good use of the Radburn Idea's economic virtues." 26. Stephenson, "Wrexham Experiment," pp. 276-77. 27. P. Ritter, "Radburn Planning: A Critical Reassessment/Classic Objectives," Architect's Journal 132 (Nov. i960): 680. 28. E. R. Scoffham, The Shape ofBritish Housing (London, 1984), pp. 42-43. 29. A. R. Miller, and J. A. Cook, "Radburn Estates Revisited," Architect's Journal 146 (Nov. 1967): 1075, quoted in E. R. Scoffham, The Shape ofBritish Housing, p. 43. 30. See Ritter's series "Radburn Planning"; Ritter, Planning for Man and Motor (London, 1964); A. Miller, "Radburn and Its Validity Today," BRS-CP-36/39, Building Research Station; BRS-CP-42/69; BRS-CP-36/39; Proceedings of Urban Planning Research Symposium, Jan. 1965; BRS-CP-23/68. See also Vere Hole et al., "Studies of 800 Houses in Conventional and Radburn Layouts" (Building Research Station, 1966); and Michael Fagence's history and analysis in "The Radburn Idea—1," Built Environment 2 (Aug. 1973): 467-70. 31. The core area of Cumbernauld is a linear city designedfora population of 45,000 on a hilltop site two miles long and one mile wide. The intention was to expand it to 75,000 population in a series of satellite villages to the north and west, including one based on the existing Cumbernauld Village. Cumbernauld-Tecbnical Brochure (1964) (hereafter cited as C.T.B.). 32. C.T.B. 33. C.T.B. 34. C.T.B., emphasis added. 35. C.T.B. The Cumbernauld planners discarded the neighborhood concept, substituting a compact plan; they provided schools, churches, shops, meeting halls, and public houses in the housing area as well as in the town center. Lewis Mumford thought the residents might still conceptualize subareas that they would call neighborhoods. 36. The traffic analysis used to test the validity of the 1958 plan resulted in some major modifications of the road network, including some multilevel grade separations and redesign of the ring road. 37. The Greater London Council's 1961 prototype plan for the high density New Town of Hook in 1961 [not built] carried the integration of the as-yet-unpublished auto traffic planning ideas of Buchanan and the pedestrian-favoring Radburn plan ideas of Stein to extraordinary heights. The failure to implement such a very sophisticated plan

262

Notes to Pages 150-162

as this may demonstrate the truth of a planning idea corollary to Parkinson's Sixth Law: "that a perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse." C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson's Laws and Other Studies of Administration (Boston, 1957), p. 60. 38. Cumbernauld Development Corporate Staff, Cumbernauld New Town Planning Proposals—Second Revision (Jan. 1962), pp. 22-24. 39. Paul Burrell, "Your Street or Your Car" in Design Council, Streets Ahead (London, 1979). 40. R. Tennenbaum, "Hail Columbia," Planning 56 (May 1990): 16. 41. Reston/Mobile Land Development Corporation, interview by author, June 1991. 42. Jim and Libby Rouse and Morton Hoppenfeld visited British and Continental European New Towns in 1963. Jim Rouse thought them dull. Hoppenfeld preferred the old cities of Europe. Gurney Breckenridge, Columbia and the New Towns (New York, 1971). 43. Dennis Dunn, land planner on the staff of the Howard Research and Development Company, Columbia, Maryland, interview by a June 24, 1991. 44. Birch, "Radburn and the American Planning Movement." 45. In recognition of his contributions to community planning and architecture, the American Institute of Architects awarded Stein its Gold Medal in 1956; Stein's English colleagues presented him with the Ebenezer Howard Memorial Award in i960. SEVEN: The Garden Suburb and the New Urbanism 1. James Howard Kunsder, Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Worldfor the 21st Century (New York, 1996), pp. 15-17. 2. James Howard Kunsder, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline ofAmerica's Man-Made Landscape (New York, 1993), p. 10. 3. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York, 2000). 4. Vincent Scully, "The Architecture of Community," in Peter Katz, The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (New York, 1994). New Urbanists have struggled ever since to prove that their movement is more comprehensive and should deal with redevelopment of older neighborhoods, regional planning, and other issues, but its roots still lie in the reform of the suburban neighborhood. 5. Lewis Mumford to Roy Lubove, Sept. 10, 1962; Dec. 2, 1962, Lubove Papers, Archives of Industrial Society, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pa. See also Marc Weiss, "Developing and Financing the 'Garden Metropolis': Urban Planning and Housing Policy in Twentieth Century America," Planning Perspectives 5 (1990): 307-19. 6. Suzanne Sutro Rhees, "From Riverside to Seaside: Historic Planned Communities, 1880S-1990," paper presented at the Seventh National Conference on American Planning History, Seattle, Oct. 23, 1997. Rhees and others, including Jonathan Barnett, have also suggested two distinct design lineages, which they call "monumental" and "picturesque." See also Jonathan Barnett, The Elusive City: Five Centuries ofDesign, Ambition, and Miscalculation (New York, 1986). 7. Perhaps the best example of Nolen's work in this sphere is Kingsport, Tennessee. See, for example, Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman's Paradise: The Design of ^American Company Towns (London, T995), chap. 8, "Professional Solutions: John Nolen

Notes to Pages 162-166

263

and the Standardization of Company Town Planning." See also Margaret Ripley Wolfe, Kingsport, Tennessee: A Planned American City (Lexington, Ky.,.1987). 8. Clarence S. Stein, Toward New Towns for America (1957; Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 41. 9. For background on Stein and the RPAA, see Edward K. Spann, Designing Modern America: The Regional Planning Association ofAmerica and Its Members (Columbus, Ohio, 1996). 10. Clarence Arthur Perry, "The Neighborhood Unit," in Neighborhood and Community Planning (New York, 1929). This was volume 7 of Regional Survey ofNew York and Its Environs, 8 vols. (New York, 1927-31). 11. The new community of Radisson, near Syracuse, New York, is a classic informal New Town, featuring a brewery that is connected to adjacent residential development by a bicycle path through the woods. For more information see Bill Fulton, "The New Town That Works," Planning 46 (Jan. 1980): 12-15. 12. Information about Irvine and Wesdake Village provided by Jack Bevash of Pereira's staff; in i960 Pereira sought (unsuccessfully) to make Stein, then seventy-six years old, part of his design team for Irvine. Bevash to Stein, Nov. 10, i960, Stein Papers, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Kroch Library, Cornell University. 13. Advocates of the garden suburb, like their formalist counterparts, never embraced Le Corbusier and, as was true of Lewis Mumford, were severe in their criticism of him and enthusiastic in their faith in the garden suburb as an antidote. 14. Jane Jacobs, The Death andLife of Great American Cities (New York, 1961), pp. 1819. 15. Lewis Mumford, "Revaluations I: Howard's Garden City," New York Review of Books, Apr. 8, 1965. 16. Lewis Mumford, The Urban Prospect (New York, 1968), p. 197. The New Yorker broadside was reprinted in this book. As Robert Fishman has pointed out, the venom of these exchanges was particularly unfortunate given the fact that they had worked together on some issues (opposing Robert Moses' plan to build a four-lane highway through Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, for example) and accurately recognized suburban sprawl as their "common enemy." Fishman, "The Mumford-Jacobs Debate," PlanningHistory Studies 10 (1996): 3-11. 17. Lewis Mumford, My Work and Days (New York, 1979), p. 493. 18. Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice (1909; Princeton, N.J., 1994). 19. Walter L. Creese, The Search for Environment: The Garden City: Before and After, expanded ed. (Baltimore, 1992), p. 368. 20. Indeed, even Radburn itself has been criticized by one architect who grew up there as having poorly designed—and, especially, overly broad—greenways that push focus and activity back toward the service lanes. Alden Christie, "Radburn Reconsidered," Connections 7 (May 25, 1964): 37-41. See also Robert A. M. Stern, with John Montague Massengale, The Anglo-American Suburb (New York, 1981). These comments foreshadow the later critique by the New Urbanists, who favor tighdy defined public spaces and often criticize spaces whose width is not strongly bounded by relatively tall structures. 21. J. M. Massengale, posting on CNU Internet listserv, June 21, 1997. 22. Ibid., June 20, 1997. 23. Andres Duany, interview by author, Orlando, Fla., June 22, 1990. Duany fre-

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Notes to Pages 167-168

quendy mentions Nolen in his speeches and uses illustrations of intersections and street patterns from Nolen's voluminous work. Both designers, of course, did a great deal of work in Florida during boom periods of real estate development. 24. James Arthur Glass, "John Nolen and the Planning of New Towns," M.A. thesis, Cornell University, 1984. Nolen took landscape architecture from Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. in the fall of r 90 3, and his school notes reflect this learning. Nolen papers, Cornell University. It is also worth noting that Stein well knew how to engage in formalistic design. He was trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and worked early in his career in the architectural office of Bertram Goodhue, where, among other things, he designed the copper-mining company town of Tyrone, New Mexico—which includes a very traditional "New Urbanist"-style axis. K. C. Parsons, "Clarence Stein's City Planning and Building Apprenticeship with Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, 1911-1918," paper delivered at the Seventh National Conference on American Planning History, Seattle, Oct. 23, 1997. 25. "This was by far the nearest thing to a New Town in America, and it was Nolen's creation." Mumford to Roy Lubove, Dec. 2, 1962, Lubove Papers. 2 6. Like Radburn, which was bankrolled byfinancierAlexander Bing, Mariemont had a rich patron—Mrs. Thomas J. Emery—who wanted to build a high-quality mixedincome community as a demonstration project. Nolen always called Mariemont "a national exemplar" and clearly regarded it as his masterpiece. He was refining the design of Mariemont and building it at the same time that Stein and Wright were doing their initial studies that led to their own designs for Sunnyside Gardens and Radburn. See also Millard F. Rogers Jr., John Nolen and Mariemont: Building a New Town in Ohio (Baltimore, 2001). 27. AnotherformerNolen assistant, Earle S. Draper, became the chief planner at the Tennessee Valley Authority, considered at the time to be the most important community design job in the New Deal. But Draper had worked for Nolen only from 1915101917 and in the interim had established a reputation as an important town planner in his own right, designing several textile towns in the South. 28. Frederick J. Adams to John Nolen, Feb. 28, 1935, Nolen Papers, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Kroch Library, Cornell University. 29. Venice, Florida, is a good example. Nolen worked for a succession of developers who grew increasingly desperate as the 1920s wore on, and the plan was never fully implemented. Correspondence with various Venice developers, Nolen Papers. 30. For example, in Toward New Towns for America, he was clearly very proud of the success of the Greenbelt Co-op, which had constructed a new supermarket shortly before the book was published. Toward New Towns, pp. 149-150. 31. K. C. Parsons, "Clarence Stein and the Greenbelt Towns: Settling for Less," Journal of the America Planning Association 60 (spring 1990): 174. 3 2. Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore, 1997), esp. chap. 2, "The Minimum House." 33. There is some evidence that Stein at least looked at Mariemont, even if he was not gready influenced by it. In 1927, just as Stein and Wright were beginning to design Radburn, Nolen's book New Towns for Old was published. Wright reviewed the book favorably for the Journal of the American Institute ofArchitects in the July 1927 issue. Also, Stein appears to have visited Mariemont in late 19 2 7. Charles J. Livingood to John Nolen, Jan. 14, 1928, Nolen Papers.

Notes to Pages 170-179

265

34. Morris Newman, "Can a Downtown Be Created from Whole Cloth?" California Planning & Development Report, May 1998, p. 10. 35. Philip Langdon, A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburb (Amherst, Mass., 1994), p. 179EIGHT: Five Generations of the Garden City 1. Evan D. Richert and Mark B. Lapping, guest editors, "Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City," Journal of the American Planning Association 64 (spring 1998): 125-33. 2. Daniel Schaffer, "Reality Counts," ibid., p. 131. 3. Robert Fishman, "Howard and the Garden," ibid., pp. 127-28. 4. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 71. 5. Ibid., p. 46. 6. Ibid., p. 51. 7. Note that for the purposes of this chapter, the examples in this section are American and British. A fuller explication would have references from around the world. For further discussion of the global impact of the garden city principles, see bibliographies in Ginette Baty-Tornikian's edition, Ebenezer Howard, Les Cites-Jardins de Demain (Paris, 1998); and in Planning Exchange, New Towns Record, 1846-1996, 50 Years of UK New Towns Development (Glasgow, r997). 8. Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice (1909; New York, 1919). 9. Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, Neighborhood and Community Planning (New York, 1929); Clarence Arthur Perry, Housing for the Machine Age (New York, 1939)10. Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, Neighborhood and Community Planning, p. 23. n . Sir John Tudor Walters, The Building of Twelve Thousand Houses (London, 1927). 12. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York, 1961). 13. Tracy Augur, "The Planning of the Town of Norris," American Architect 148 (Apr. 1936): 19-26; Thomas Adams, Design ofResidential Areas (Cambridge, 1934). 14. Clarence Stein, Toward New Towns for America (1951; 1st American ed., 1957; Cambridge, Mass., 1966); K. C. Parsons, "Clarence Stein and the Greenbelt Towns: Setding for Less," Journal ofthe American Planning Association 56 (spring 1990): 161-83; Kermit Carlisle Parsons, ed., The Writings of Clarence S. Stein: Architect of the Planned Community (Baltimore, 1998). 15. C. B. Purdom, The Garden City: A Study in the Development ofa Modern Town (London, 1913); Purdom, Town Theory and Practice (London, 1921); Purdom, The Building of Satellite Towns (London, 1949); Purdom, The Letchworth Achievement (London, 1963); Stephen V. Ward, ed., The Garden City: Past, Present and Future (London, 1992); Dennis Hardy, From Garden Cities to New Towns (London, 1991); Hardy, From New Towns to Green Politics (London, 1991). 16. Simon Enterprises, The Reston Story (n.p., n.d.). 17. Columbia, A Presentation to the Officials and Citizens of Howard Country, Maryland (Nov. 11,1964). 18. Ibid. 19. Robert Tennenbaum, "Hail Columbia," Planning Magazine 56 (May 1990): 1617-

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Notes to Pages 179-189

20. Martha E. Munzer and John Vogel Jr., New Towns: Building CitiesfromScratch (New York, 1974); Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies, Reston: A Study in Beginnings (Washington, D.C., 1966); Robert Tennenbaum, ed., Creating a New City, Columbia, Maryland (Columbia, Md., 1996). 21. For details, see Planning Exchange, The New Towns Record, passim. 2 2. Robert H. Freilich and Michael Shultz, Model Subdivision Regulations: Planning and Law (Chicago, 1995). 23. Joseph DeChiara, Time Saver Standardsfor Housing and Development, 3rd ed. (New York, 1995); and David Listokin and Carole Walker, The Subdivision and Site Plan Handbook (New Brunswick, N.J., 1989). 24. See "Re-Inventing the City" and "The New Metropolitan Agenda," special issues of the Brookings Review 18 (summer 2000) and 16 (fall 1998), for further discussion of this topic. See also William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York, 1997). 25. See smartgrowth.org (last accessed Dec. 23, 2001); 1998 ULI on the Future, Smart Growth, Economy, Community, Environment (Washington, D.C., 1998). 26. Karen A. Danielson and Robert E. Lang, "The Case for Higher-Density Housing: A Key to Smart Growth?" in ULI, Smart Growth, pp. 28-36. 27. Brett Van Akkern, Office of Policy, Division of Urban and Economic Development, U.S. Department of Environmental Protection, interview with author, Sept. 15, 1998. 28. Robert Steuteville, "Year of Growth for New Urbanism," New Urban News 3 (Sept.-Oct. 1998): 1, 8-13; Alexander Garvin, "Is the New Urbanism Passe?" husk Review 4 (spring 1998): 2-21. 29. Robert Chapman LQ, "New Urban Projects Yield Solid Returns," New Urban News 3 (Jan.-Feb. 1998): 1, 8-10. 30. "New Urbanism Basics," www.cnu.org/newurbanism.html (last accessed Sept. 2, 1998). This was a paraphrase of Congress for the New Urbanism, "Charter of the New Urbanism," 1998, www.cnu.org/cnu_reports/Charter.pdf (last accessed Jan. 10, 2002). 31. David Schuyler, "The New Urbanism and the Modern Metropolis," Urban History 24 Pec. 1997): 344-58. 32. Celebration Company, Preview, A Self-Guided Tour through Celebration's Lot Sites (Oct. 1996); Witold Rybczynski, "Celebration, an American Town," New Yorker, July 22, 1996, pp. 36-39, Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, Celebration, USA.: Living in Disney's Brave New Town (New York, 1999). 33. Ruth Eckdish Knack, "Once upon a Town," Planning Magazine 62 (Mar. 1996): 10-14. 34. Celebration Company, Celebration, an American Town (n.p., n.d.). 35. Michael Pollan, "Town-Building Is No Mickey Mouse Operation," New York Times Magazine, Dec. 14, 1997, p. 62. 36. Celebration Company, Celebration Pattern Book, 1st ed. (Mar. 1995). 37. "Sacramento Redevelopment Uses New Urbanist Fund," Planning Magazine 63 (Nov. 1997): 26-27. 38. E. L. Birch, "Housing and Urban Communities," in Jonathan Barnett, ed., Planning for a New Century: The Metropolitan Agenda (Washington, D.C., 2000); "Hope VI: Emerging Examples oflnner City New Urbanism," New UrbanNewsj (Jan-_Feb. 1998): 1.4-7-

Notes to Pages 189-198

267

39. New York City Department of City Planning, Melrose Commons Urban Renewal Plan (New York, May 1989; reissued, 1992). 40. David Gonzalez, "Revolution of People Power Wells Up in the Bronx," New York Times, July 8,1993, p. B-4; Mervyn Rothstein, "A Renewal Plan in the Bronx Advances," New York Times, July 10, 1994, sec. 9, p. r; Herbert Muschamp, "Slouching towards Utopia in the South Bronx," New York Times, Dec. 3, 1993, p. 1. 41. The Urban Assembly, Bronx Center: Active Streets/Safe Neighborhoods (n.d.). 42. Statement ofPlanning Principles Written and Provided by the Nos Quedamos / We Stay Committee (New York, n.d.) (provided but not included with the urban renewal plan). 43. Dennis Hevesi, "New Homes for the South Bronx," New York Times, Oct. 8, 2000, sec. 11, p. 1. 44. PaulM. Sachner, "Common Sense," Architectural Record 177 (Mar. 1989): 84-89; Urban Land Institute, "Mashpee Commons, Mashpee, Massachusetts," Project Reference File, vol. 21, no.13. 45. www.mashpeecommons.com. 46. Douglas Storrs, letter to Eugenie L. Birch, May n , 2001 (in possession of the author); Mashpee Commons, "Presentation to the Residents of the Town of Mashpee: The Four Neighborhoods of Mashpee Commons, Whitings Road, Job's Fishing Road, East Steeple Street and North Market Street, Phase 2," Aug. 27, 1998 (photocopy in possession of the author). 47. Orange County Planning Department, Lakeside Village Specific Area Plan, Adopted May 20, 1997, p. 1. 48. The range accommodates different housing types. The plan designates minimum lot sizes as well. The range is 4,800 square feet for village homes to 7,200 square feet for estate homes. See also Carol Stricklin, AICP, and Bruce W. McClendon, FAICP, "Adapting the Garden City Concept," paper presented at the American Planning Association National Planning Conference, Boston, Apr. 19, 2000. 49. Orange County Planning Department, Village Development Code Ordinance, Adopted May 20, 1997, p. 1. 50. Bruce McClendon, director, Office of Planning and Development, Orange County, Florida, interview with author, Sept. 16, 1998. 51. "Bye-Bye Suburban Dream, 15 Ways to Fix the Suburbs," Newsweek, May 15, 1995; Pollan, "Town-Building Is No Mickey Mouse Operation"; Harold R. Sleeper and Charles G. Ramsey, Architectural Graphic Standards, 9th ed. (New York, 1994). 52. Jason R. Miller, R. John Anderson, and Don Johnson, eds., The Traditional Neighborhood Design Series, vols. 1-3 (Minneapolis, 1998), Charles C. Bohl, "In Print," Urban Land 57 (Aug. 1998): 83-84. 5 3. www.greenbelt.0rg/HOUSING2 .html; Will Fleissig, "Transforming the Charter into Action: CNU VI Lessons," New Urban News 3 (July-Aug. 1998): 14. 54. www.cnt.org/lem/apa.html. 55. www.planning.org/pubs/aug98.html. 56. Neil Pierce, "Maryland's 'Smart Growth' Law: ANational Model?" Apr. 20,1997, alliance.napawash.org; see also smartgrowth.org. 57. Urban Redevelopment Authority, URA Report (Singapore, 1995); or www.ura.sg/ dgp_reports/tampines/text/pp-land.html.

268

Notes to Pages 201-210

NINE: Green Cities and the Urban Future 1. Howard, quoted in Dennis Hardy, From Garden Cities to New Towns: Campaigning for Town and County Planning, 1899-1946 (London, r99r), p. 24. 2. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902; Cambridge, Mass. 1965), p. 48. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., p. 46. 5. Ibid., p. 48. 6. World Watch Institute, World Watch Reader (Washington, D.C., 1994), p. 54. See also Bill McKibben, The End ofNature (New York, 1989). 7. Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism (Boston, 1999), p. 240; McKibben, End ofNature. 8. White House Initiative on Global Climate Change, clint0n5.nara.gov/Initiatives/ Climate/main.html (last accessed Dec. 23, 20oi). 9. Rainforest Alliance, www.rainforest-alliance.org (last accessed Dec. 23, 2001). 10. United Nations Environment Programme, Agenda 21, chap. 12—Managing Fragile Ecosystems: Desertification and Drought, www.unep.org/documents/ (last accessed Dec. 23, 2001). n . World Resources Institute, The 1993 Information Please Environmental Almanac (Boston, 1992), p. 148. 12. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 135. 13. Ibid., p. 48. 14. Public Technologies, Inc., Cities and Counties: Thinking Globally, Acting Locally (Washington, D.C., 1996), p. 1. 1.5. United Nations, World Resources—A Guide to the Global Environment (New York, 1997), p. 2. 16. Ibid., p. 3. 17. City of Austin, Sustainable Communities Initiative (Austin, 1997), p. 2. 18. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 42. 19. Sustainable Seattle, Indicators of Sustainable Community (Seattle, 1995), p. 1. 20. Public Technologies, Inc., Cities and Counties, p. 1. 21. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 131. 22. Ibid., p. 44. 23. New Jersey Office of State Planning, Communities of Place (Trenton, 1998); Sustainable Seattle, A Primerfor Creating New Measurements ofProgress (Seattle, 1996), p. 2. 24. Peter Berg, Beryl Magilavy, and Seth Zuckerman, A Green City Program for the San Francisco Bay Area and Beyond (San Francisco, 1990), p. ix. 25. Ibid., p. xiv. 26. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 72. 27. South Florida Regional Planning Council, Eastward Ho! (Hollywood, Fla., 1996), p. 5. 28. Hudson Valley Grass Roots Energy & Environmental Network, Hudson Valley Green Times 17, no. 1 (winter 1997): 1. 29. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 140. 30. United States Environmental Protection Agency Smart Growth Network, Smart Growth Tool Catalogue (Washington, D.C., 1998), p. 1. 3 r. South Florida Regional Planning Council, Eastward Ho! p. 5.

Notes to Pages 210-224

269

32. Christine Todd Whitman, "News Release: Testimony before the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee on Senate Concurrent Resolution 66" (Trenton, N.J.", 1998), p. 1. 33. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, pp. 127, 48. 34. Stephan Schmidheiny, Changing Course (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. xi. 35. Ibid., p. xii 36. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 44. 37. Robert D. Yaro and Tony Hiss, A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area (Washington, D.C., 1996); Schmidheiny, Changing Course, p. xii. 38. South Florida Regional Planning Council, Eastward Ho! p. 1. 39- Berg, Magilavy, and Zuckerman, Green City Program, p. xiv. 40. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 156. 41. Ibid., p. 48. 42. Ibid., p. 55. 43- Ibid. 44. Ibid., p. 18. 45. Ibid., p. 113, emphasis added. 46. Ibid., p. 147. 47. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York, 1961), p. 93. 48. Ibid., p. 9. 49. Ibid., p. 13. 50. Ibid., p. 9. 5i- Ibid., p. 52. 52- Ibid., p. 17. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 158. 5354. Mumford, City in History, p. 89. 55. Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, p. 128. TEN: The Howard Legacy 1. Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and the Study of Civics (London, 1915), p. 34. 2. Anthony Sutcliffe, ed., Metropolis 1890-1940 (London, 1984). 3. Stanley Buder, Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community (New York, 1991), p. 133. 4. Robert Freestone, "The Australian Garden City," in S. V. Ward, ed., The Garden City: Past, Present and Future (London, 1992), p. 107. 5. Mervyn Miller, Letchworth: The First Garden City (Chichester, 1989); R. Filler, A History of Welwyn Garden City (Chichester, 1986); M. de Soissons, Welwyn Garden City: A Town Designed for Healthy Living (Cambridge, 1988); Stephen V. Ward, "Ideal Communities and Capitalism: Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City," in J. R. Bryson and T. R. Slater, eds., Creating Spaces: Model Settlements, Garden Cities and New Towns (Aldershot, 2002). 6. F. J. Osborn and A. Whittick, The New Towns: Their Origins, Achievements and Progress (London, 1977). 7. Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1988), p. 87; Lewis Mumford, "The Garden City Idea

270

Notes to Pages 224-233

and Modern Planning," in Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, ed. F. J. Osborn (1946; Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 26. 8. Ebenezer Howard, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London, 1898), pp. 1-19, 128-52. 9. Ibid, p. 15; see also F.J. Osborn to L. Mumford, July n , 1944, inM. R. Hughes, ed., The Letters ofLewisMumford andF.J. Osborn: A Transatlantic Dialogue, 193 S-70 (Bath, 1971), p. 58. 10. S. Muthesius, The English Terraced House (New Haven, Conn., 1982). 11. C. Garnaut, Colonel Light Gardens: Model Garden Suburb (Darlinghurst, New South Wales, 1999). 12. J. P. Gaudin, "The French Garden City," in S. V Ward, The Garden City, pp. 5268; M. Cornu, "Suresnes: La modernite d'une ecole de civisme," Urbanisme et Architecture 242 (1990): 63-65; H. Hellinga, "Amsterdam 1934: General Expansion Plan," in K. Bosma and H. Hellinga, eds., Mastering the City: North-European City Planning 19002000, 2 vols. (Rotterdam, 1997), 2:216-25. 13. Mervyn Miller, Raymond Unwin: Garden Cities and Town Planning (Leicester, 1992), passim, esp. pp. 122-25. 14. Howard, To-morrow, p. 24. 15. D. A. Farnie, The Manchester Ship Canal and the Rise ofthe Port ofManchester, 1894 1975 (Manchester, U.K., 1980), pp. 118-40. 16. M. MacKeith, The History and Conservation of Shopping Arcades (London, 1986). 17. S. V. Ward, "The Garden City Introduced," in S. V Ward, The Garden City. 18. Patrick Abercrombie, The Greater London Plan 1944 (London, 1945). 19. Peter Hall and Colin Ward, Sociable Cities: The Legacy ofEbenezer Howard (Chichester, 1998), pp. 91-95. 20. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The Failure of Town Planning (1961; Harmondsworth, 1964), pp. 27-31. 21. Mumford to Osborn, Oct. 19, 1962, in Hughes, Letters ofMumford and Osborn, p. 326. 22. Mumford to Osborn, Feb. 28, 1963, in ibid., p. 335. 23. U. Wannop, "New Towns," in J. B. Cullingworth, ed., British Planning: 50 Years of Urban and Regional Policy (London, 1999), pp. 213-31. 24. Alexander Garvin, The American City: What Works, What Doesn't (New York, 1996), PP- 347-4925. Dennis Hardy, From New Towns to Green Politics: Campaigning for Town and Country Planning 1946-1990 (London, 1991), esp. pp. 172-92. 26. E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (London, 1973); J. Porritt and D. Winner, The Coming of the Greens (London, 1988). 27. Hardy, From New Towns to Green Politics, 172-89. 28. G. H. Brunddand, Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (Oxford, 1987). 29. Ibid., p. 8. 30. United Nations, Earth Summit Agenda 21: The UN Programme of Action-from Rio (New York, 1993). 31. R. H. Williams, European Union Spatial Policy and Planning (London, 1996). 32. Commission of the European Communities, Green Paper on the Urban Environment (EUR 12902 EN) (Brussels, 1990), pp. 40, 43.

Notes to Pages 233- 244.

271

33. M. Jenks, E. Burton, and K. Williams, eds., The Compact City: A Sustainable Urban Form? (London, 1996). 34. A. Blowers, ed., Planning for a Sustainable Environment: A Report by the Town and Country Planning Association (London, 1993); M. Breheny, ed., Sustainable Development and Urban Form (London, 1992); S. Owens, Energy, Planningand Urban Form (London, 1986); Hall and Ward, Sociable Cities. 35. For an ambitious proposal along these lines, see Hall and Ward, Sociable Cities, pp. 151-70. 36. Great Britain Secretary of State for the Environment, Household Growth: Where Shall We Live? (London, 1996). 37. Lord Rogers of Riverside, Towards an Urban Renaissance: Final Report ofthe Urban Task Force Chaired by Lord Rogers ofRiverside (London, 1999), p. 63. 38. Ibid., p. 50. 39. S. V. Ward, "American and Other International Examples in British Planning Policy Formation: A Comparison of the Barlow, Buchanan and Rogers Reports, 1940-1999," paper presented at the International Planning History Society Seminar on Americanisation and the British City in the Twentieth Century, University of Luton, U.K., May 6, 2000. 40. T. Beadey, Green Urbanism: LearningfromEuropean Cities (Washington, 2000), pp. 38-39. 41. Ibid., pp. 78-79; R. Pistor, B. Polak, M. Riechelmann, P. Rijnaarts, L. Slot, and J. Smit, eds., A City in Progress: Physical Planning in Amsterdam, Dienst Ruimtelijke Ordening Amsterdam (The Hague, 1994), pp. 99-101; L. Baljon and M. Pflug, Nieuw Sloten Amsterdam: Garden City of Today (Bussum, 2002). 42. Beadey, Green Urbanism, pp. 41-52. 43. P. Brouwer, "Almere 1977," in K. Bosma and H. Hellinga, eds., Mastering the City: North-European City Planning 1900-2000, 2:338-45; Beadey, Green Urbanism, pp. 48-49. 44. P. Hall, Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation and Urban Order (London, 1998), pp. 842-87. 45. J. Radberg, Den Svenska Tradgdrdsstaden (Stockholm, 1994). 46. L. Nystrom, Living in Sweden—Between Tradition and Vision (Karlskrona, Sweden, 1996), p. 91. 47. Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) Emscher Park, Katalog der Prqjekte (n.p., J 999) 48. D. Schuyler, "The New Urbanism and the Modern Metropolis," Urban History 24 (Dec. 1977): 344-58. 49. P. Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community and the American Dream (New York, 1993). 50. Hall and Ward, Sociable Cities, pp. 147-48, 151-70. 51. Lord Rogers of Riverside, Towards an Urban Renaissance, pp. 90, 134-35. 52. For example, Beadey, Green Urbanism. 53. Note, however, that neither of these shows much direct allegiance to the garden city in the form in which Howard proposed it. T. Lloyd-Jones, Curitiba: Sustainability by Design, RUDI Web site, rudi.herts.ac.uk (accessed July n , 2000); P. Hall, "Cool Brazil— A Pilgrimage to Curitiba," Town and Country Planning 69 (July-Aug. 2000): 208-9; M. Perry, L. Kong, and B Yeoh, Singapore: A Developmental City State (Chichester, 1997), pp. 211-17.

Contributors

Eugenie L. Birch, FAICP, is professor and chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. A distinguished scholar and teacher, she is the editor of The Unsheltered Woman: Women and Housing in the 80s (1985) and has served as a member of the New York City Planning Commission and as president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History. Pierre Clavel is professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University. He is the author of The Progressive City: Planning and Participation, 1969-1984 (1986) and a coauthor of Reinventing Cities: Equity Planners Tell Their Stories (1994). Robert Fishman is professor of architecture and planning at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (1977) and Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987) and editor of The American Planning Tradition (2000).

274

Contributors

Robert Freestone teaches in the Planning and Urban Development Program, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Model Communities: The Garden City Movement in Australia (1989), the editor of Urban Planning in a Changing World: The Twentieth Century Experience (2000), and a coeditor of The Australian Metropolis: A Planning History (2000). William Fulton, former editor of California Planning, is president of the Solimar Research Group. He is the author of The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles (1997) and a coauthor, with Peter Calthorpe, of The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (2001). Mervyn Miller, Ph.D., a chartered architect and town planner, is the author of Letchworth: The First Garden City (1989) and Raymond Unwin: Garden Cities and Town Planning (1992), among other works. He is the president of the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust and a member of the Letchworth Garden City Advisory Group. Kermit C. Parsons was professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University. A distinguished planner and historian, he is best known as the author of The Cornell Campus: A History ofIts Planning and Development (1968) and the editor of The Writings of Clarence S. Stein: Architect of the Planned Community (1998). David Schuyler is Shadek Professor of the Humanities and professor of American studies at Franklin and Marshall College and a past president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History. He is the author of The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (1986), Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815-1852 (1996), and A City Transformed: Redevelopment, Race, and Suburbanization in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 194.0-1980 (2002) and an editor of three volumes of the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers. Stephen V. Ward is professor of planning history at Oxford Brookes University and president of the International Planning History Society. He is the author of The Geography oflnterwar Britain: The State and Uneven Development (1988), Planning and Urban Change (1994), and Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities 1850-2000 (1998). He is also the editor of The Garden City: Past, Present and Future (1992) and a coeditor (with J. R. Gold) of Place Promotion: The Use ofPublicity and Marketing to Sell Towns and Regions

Contributors

275

(1994). He is preparing an international history of urban planning in the twentieth century and researching the work of several global planners. Robert F. Young, a city and regional planner, is former director of the Office of Sustainability in the New Jersey Department of Commerce.

Indej

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations and photographs. Abercrombie, Patrick, 54, 74, 79, 80, 86, gg, 124 Ackerman, Frederick L, 125 Adams, Frederick, J., 167-68 Adams, Thomas, 73, 84, 85, 100,115, 175, 256n. 1 adaptations of Howard ideas: American, 160-61; British, 161-62; contemporary, 185-86;fifthgeneration of, 183-85; first generation of, 173, 174; fourth generation of, 179-83; implementation devices, 195, 197-98, 199-200; international, 198,199; overview of, 171-73,174; second generation of, 175, 177; third generation of, 177, 179 Adelaide, Australia, 70-71, 74, 225 Adel Grange, Leeds, 105 Adenaur, Konrad, 76 agricultural greenbelt, 12, 43-44, 97 air pollution, 202-3

Alexander, Robert, 145 Almere, Netherlands, 237 altruism, 25-28 American Greenbelt Towns, 175 American new towns, 160-61, 163, 167-68, 169-70, 230-31 American Planning Association, 182 Amsterdam, Netherlands, 226 Anglo-American Suburb, The (Massengale), 165 antiplanning activism, 230-31 Architectural Graphic Standards (Sleeper and Ramsey), 195 Architectural Review, 139,143 archives of Howard papers, 15 Arrhenius, Svante, 203 "Artisans' Quarter" plan (Unwin), 113,114, 115,116 Art ofBuilding a Home, The (Parker and Unwin), 105,106, 120

278

Index

Art of Colonisation (Wakefield), 18 Arts and Crafts movement, 30, 32, 103, 104-5,13° Asia, greenbelts in, 79 Atterbury, Grosvenor, 162 Augur, Tracy, 175 Austin, Texas, 206 automobile: bounded city and, 62-63; British adaptations of Radburn plan and, 145,146, 147; Cumbernauld New Town and, 147-50; Howard and, 214; impact of, 243-44; Radburn plan and, 64, 13335, 163; Reston plan and, 154; storage of, 158; taming, 150-51; town-center design and, 168

glect of, 64; purpose of, 58-59; relevance of, 65-66 Bournville Village, Birmingham, 61,104 Breheny, Michael, 94-96,96, 234 Brentham, West London, 120,122 Brett, Lionel, 143 Britain: adaptations of Howard ideas in, 160-61; brownfield land in, 234-35, 235> greenbelt cities in, 79-81, 80, 81; Radburn plan and, 145,146,147; sustainable development in, 233-35, 239> Thatcher administration, 79, 224, 234; transit-oriented development in, 239, 241; urban settlements of, 222. See also London British New Towns: death of program for, 181-82; Howard and, 229, 231; legislaBacon, Edmund, 65 tion regarding, 175; Mumford and, 64Baldwin Hills Village, California, 135, 145, 65; priorities of, 153-54; Thatcher adJ ministration and, 224. See also under spe57 cific towns Barnett, Henrietta, 113, 115 British Town and Country Planning AssociBarrow Hill, England, 103 ation, 94-96 Basildon New Town, 145 Bauer, Catherine, 137,155 Bromhead, Frank, 115 Beevers, Robert, 15, 38,42, 43 brownfield land, 234-35, 23S Bellamy, Edward: Howard and, 23; Looking Brunddand, Gro Harlem, 232 Backward, 2000-1887, 4, 5-6, 18, 103; Bryan, William Jennings, 54 Nationalisation of Labour Society and, 19 Buckingham, James Silk, National Evils and Bennett, E. H., 75-76 Practical Remedies, 6-7, 18 Berg, Peter, 208 Buder, Stanley, 16,19 Berlin, Germany, 76-77, 236 Building of Satellite Towns, The (Purdom), Bing, Alexander, 131 177 Birch, Eugenie, 158 Bull, William, 74 Bitter Cry of Outcast London, The (Mearns), 3Burnham, Daniel, 75-76,124 Blair, Tony, 79 Burrell, Paul, 151 Blaise Hamlet, Bristol, 100-101,101 Business Council for Sustainable Developblock system: Greenhill-Bradway and, 145; ment, 211 history of, 120, 121, 122, 123; Radburn bylaw terraced development, 120, 721 and, 133-34; Reston and, 154; Stein, Wright, and, 135 Cadbury, George, 30, 61, 104 Boise River Greenbelt, Idaho, 90 Calthorpe, Peter, 66, 94,95, 184, 239, 241 Booth, Charles, Life and Labour of the People Canadian Commission of Conservation, 84 ofLondon, 3 Canberra, Australia, 87 Boston, Massachusetts, 75, 89 Capital Area Greenbelt Association, 90 Boulder, Colorado, 83, 91, 242 car. See automobile bounded city: automobile and, 62-63; as Carpenter, Edward, 102, 103,105 critique of expanding metropolis, 59-61; Case for Land Nationalisation, The (Hyder), desire for, 63; factory districts as, 61-62; 3° influence of, 12; job market and, 63; neCauchon, Naulon, 127, 130

Index Celebration, Florida, 185, 186-88, 187, 200 Centennial Place, Georgia, 188-89 Center for Livable Communities, California, 184 Center for Neighborhood Technology, 197 Central Park Conservancy, New York City, "3 Changing Course (Schmidheiny), 211 Chartists, 100 Chatham Village, Pittsburgh, 135, 157 Cheshire New Town, 151 Chicago, Illinois, 16, 19-20, 62, 75-76, 124-25, 249n. 22 Chicago school of sociology, 173 cites-jardin of Paris, 225-26, 226, 238 Cities and Counties (Public Technologies, Inc.), 205 Cities in Evolution (Geddes), 86 city, reinvention of, 217-21 City, The (film), 175 City Housing Corporation, 131 City in History, The (Mumford), 56-57, 175, 218, 219, 220-21 "City of Health and How to Build It, The" (Howard), 18-19 civic realm. See community "Civics" (Geddes), 45-51 Cleveland, H.W.S., 75 Cologne, Germany, 76 colonization schemes, 6, 41 Columbia, Maryland: design of, 179; as example of garden city, 44; Radburn plan and, 163,177; sales brochure for, 181; Stein and, 152, 155-58,156 Communities ofPlace (New Jersey Office of State Planning), 207-8 community: as defined by physical spaces, 12-13,41-42, 169, 227; democracy and, 212-13; Geddes and, 45-53; Howard and, 51; purpose of city and, 218-19 compact city, 235-39, 242 Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), 185-86 conservative surgery concept, 53-54 consumption patterns and bounded city, 63 Contemporary Review, 19

279

cooperaave movement, 22-23, 22> 4° copartnership movement, 23, 30, 32 Co-Partnership Tenants, 115 Copenhagen, Denmark, 84, 229-30 coral reefs, 203 Cornell University, Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies, 2, 8-9 corridor-and-wedge development, 84-86 Cottage Plans and Common Sense (Unwin), 107-8, 108 Cottages near a Town (Unwin), 108-9 Coventry housing schemes (England), 137, 144, 145 Crane, Walter, 29 Creese, Walter, 100, 130,165 Crow, Arthur, 76-77 Crystal Palace, 7, 229 Cullen, Gordon, 139, 143 Culture of Cities (Mumford), 260m 7 Cumbernauld New Town, 137,147-50, i4g, 26m. 31 Daily Mail (newspaper), 30 Darwinism, 40 Davis, California, 165, 242 Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs), 65, 66, 181-82 "decency of surroundings," 102 DeChiara, Joseph, 183 democracy in garden city, 212 -13 density, residential: in Britain, 234, 239, 241; in British New Towns, 145, 157; Howard and, 225-26; Parker, Unwin, and, 32; in United States, 241-42 Design ofResidential Areas (Adams), 175 Design with Nature (McHarg), 88 Dickman, George, 20 "directed growth" scenario, 210 Disney, Walt, 186 Doebele, William, 179 Doncaster, Scotland, 86 Draper, Earle S., 26411. 27 Drummond, William E., 124 Duany, Andres, 65, 165, 166, 184, 190 Dublin, Ireland, 120,123 Dunfermline, Scodand, 52, 53, 54 Durkheim, Emile, 45

280

Index

Ealing Garden Suburb, London, 73-74 ecological city, 93-96 ecology and greenbelts, 90 economic issues: American new towns and, 168, 169-70, 230-31; bounded city and, 59-61,63; garden city adaptations and, 192; garden city and, 23, 25, 71-72, 21011; profit motive, 217; reinvention of city and, 220 EDAW, 170 Ehrenhalt, Alan, Lost City, 62 Eisner, Michael, 186 Eliot, Charles, 75 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 16 Emery, Mrs. Thomas J., 26411. 26 Engels, Friedrich, 41 England. See Britain; British New Towns Europe, sustainable urbanism in, 235-39, 241, 242

Gans, Herbert, 179 Garden Cities and Town Planning (journal), 54 Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, 33 Garden Cities of To-morrow (Howard): centennial edition of, 13; introduction to, 64, 215; managerial systems and, 208-9; premise of, 204; publication of, 1-2, 28, 29 garden city: bylaw terraced development compared to, 120,121; capital in, 23, 25, 210-11; compromises of, 38-40, 43-44; critique of, 55; as culturally and historically specific concept, 97-98; deconstruction and rediscovery of, 229-31, 232; democracy jn, 212-13; description of, 78; economics of, 71-72; environmental reform and, 5; growth of, 72, 120; as reaction to nineteenth-century city, 2-8; as Fabian Society, 17, 28, 252n. 38 realistic alternative, 5-6; size of, 8, 71, farmland preservation, 91 228; as theory and program, 40-42. See Farsta, Sweden, 237 also bounded city Federal Housing Administration (U.S.), 175 Garden City, The (Purdom), 177 Fields, Factories and Workshops (Kropotkin),Garden City, The (Ward), 177 2 Garden City Association, 1, 7, 28, 29-30, 3 32. See also Letchworth Garden City Finley, William, 152, 155 Garden City Heritage Foundation, 90 First Garden City, Ltd., 8, 30,31, 43, 73 garden city movement, 28, 29-30, 32, 44 Fishman, Robert, 16, 41-42, 55, 93, 171, Garden City Pioneer Company, Ltd., 1 172 Garden City Tenants, Ltd., 112, 113 Flournoy, Bill, 88 garden suburb, 32-33, 161-63 footpaths: in American designs, 157; in CoGeddes, Patrick: Beevers on, 38-39; Cities lumbia, 156-57; in Cumbernauld New in Evolution, 86; civic pageant, 53; civics Town, 147-48, 150; in Radburn plan, J and, 51-53; conservative surgery concept 34-35; m Reston, 152-53, 154; in of, 53-54; conurbation, 222; critique of, Stockholm, 150; Unwin and, 26on. 5 55-56; on evolution from town to city, Ford, Isabella, 105 50-51; on industrial city, 44-45; photo Forest Hills Gardens, New York, 162 of, 39; regional survey and, 52, 54; on formal design, 160, 166-67, 169-70 school, 47-50,48; on transformation to Forshaw, J. H., 124 neotechnic city, 47; on typology of cities, Frankfurt, Germany, 73-74, 90 45-47; Unwin and, 120, 123, 124; valley Freilich, Robert H., 182 From Garden Cities to New Towns (Hardy), plan, 46 George, Henry, 6, 18,41, 59,60 '77 From New Towns to Green Politics (Hardy), German Green party, 206 r Germany, 73-74, 76-77, 222, 235, 236, 77 Fulneck, West Yorkshire, 100 238-39,241

Index growth management, 91, 92, 93, 98 Glass, James Arthur, 166-67 Gruen, Victor, 247^ 22 Glendening, Parris, 197-98, 211 Guild of St. George, 102 global consensus, assumption of, 206-8 Goodwyn, Lawrence, 54 Haar, Charles, 179 Governor's Commission for a Sustainable Hall, Peter: on green backcloth, 76; on South Florida, 208-9 greenbelts, 67; on Howard, 224; on parkGoyder, G. W., 71 belts, 73-74; sustainable development Greater London Regional Planning Comand, 234, 235; transit-oriented developmittee, 74-75 ment and, 239, 241 Greber, Jacques, 90 Hampstead Garden Suburb: "Artisans' green backcloth, 76-77 Quarter," 113,114, 1.15,116; Asmuns Greenbelt, Maryland, 77, 135,167, 168, Place, 120, 124; block system, 120, 122; !75. n8 design of, 32, 99-100, 162; Howard's Green Belt (London and Home Counties) ideal and, 173; Linnell Close, 115,117; Act of 1938, 75 planning and, 105; quadrangles and, 108; Greenbelt Alliance, San Francisco Bay Area, Radburn compared to, 133-35; Reynolds 91, 184, 197 Close, 115,118, 119; Stein, Wright, and, greenbelt city, 77-83 133 Greenbelt Coalition of Mid-Missouri, 88, Hardy, Dennis, 98, 177 90 Harlow New Town, 145 greenbelts: agricultural, 12, 43-44, 97; conHarmon Cove, New Jersey, 181, 182 temporary, 213; criticisms of, 81-83; garHarmsworth, Alfred, 30 den city and, 234; general typology of city Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 90 forms, 68-69; green backcloth form of, Hartzog, Justin, 167 76-77; greenbelt city form of, 77-83; Hawken, Paul, 217 green-girdle form of, 74-75; greenway Hemel Hempstead New Town, 145 form of, 88, 89, 90; green wedges and Heronsgate, Hertfordshire, 100 corridors, 84-86; green zone form of, Hise, Greg, Magnetic Los Angeles, 62 90-93; overview of, 67, 70, 96-98; parkhistory: lack of knowledge of, 216; New belt form of, 73-74; parkland town, 70Urbanism and, 159-60 71; parkways and greenwebs, 75-76; polHolliday, Clifford, 138, 140 icy objectives of, 81; regional city, 86-88, Holly Lodge, London, 100 *7 HomefromNowhere (Kunsder), 159 green city: advocates for, 205, 206, 207-8, Homeownership Zone grant program, 188 212; role of, 219, 220-21 Green City Program for San Francisco Bay Hook New Town, 26i-62n. 37 Area Cities and Towns (Berg), 208, 212-13 Hope VI program, 188-89 Hoppenfeld, Morton, 152, 155 green girdle, 74-75 Horizon West-Lakeside Village, Florida, Greenhill-Bradway, Sheffield, 142, 143, 145 185, 192-95, 194, 196 Greenhills, Ohio, 167 Housing for the Machine Age (Perry), 173 greenhouse effect, 202-3 Green Paper on the Urban Environment (Eu-Houten, Netherlands, 236-37 Howard, Ebenezer: Chicago and, 16, 19ropean Commission), 233 20; early years of, 16; Geddes compared green tax schemes, 209 to, 51-57; influence of, 2, 9, 10, 12-13, greenways, 88, 89, 90 Grey, Earl, 30 32~33> 37. 98. i7I-72> 199-200. 224~ 29; inspiration for, 201; inventions of, 17; Griffin, Walter Burley, 87

282

Index

Index

Howard, Ebenezer {continued) Jacobs' critique of, 65, 164, 230; last days of, 14-15; marriages of, 15, 17, 28, 3536; on nature, 204; photo of, 36; proposals of, 18-19; public life of, 28; social ideas of, 17-18, 205; from "Some Difficulties Considered," 216; Stein, Wright, and, 131; vision of, 207-8; Welwyn Garden City and, 33-37, 35 Howard, Lizzie, 17, 28, 35-36 Howard, Mrs., 15 Howard Cottage Society, 112-13 How the Other HalfLives (Riis), 3 Hudson Valley Green Times, 209 Hulme, Manchester, 230, 235, 241 Hyder, Joseph, The Case for Land Nationalisation, 30 Hygeia (Richardson), 18, 41 Hyndman, H. M., 18

Kunsder, James Howard, 159 Kunzmann, K R., 93

Laguna West, California, 185 land: agricultural greenbelts, 12, 43-44, 97; brownfield, 234-35, 235; coordination of use of, 197; farmland preservation, 91 land, communal ownership of: Christianity and, 27-28; compromises on, 223-24; democracy and, 212; greenbelt and, 72; Howard and, 6, 23, 27; Land Nationalisation Society and, 18; Letchworth Garden City and, 43 Lander, H. Clapham, 108 Land Nationalisation Society, 18, 19, 23, 29-30 Langer, Gustav, 76-77 Last Landscape, The (Whyte), 84, 86, 97 Le Corbusier, 41, 64-65, 164 Letchworth Achievement, The (Purdom), 177 IBA (Internationale Bauausstellung) EmLetchworth Cottages and Building Society, scher Park, Germany, 238-39, 241 112-13 Indore, India, 53 Letchworth Garden City: centennial of, 2; industrial ecology, 214 compromises of, 38,43-44, 223-24; enindustrial estate, 228-29 vironmental dimensions of, 32; establishindustry, decentralization of, 61-62, 214 ment of, 28; First Garden City, Ltd., 8, informal design, 160, 164-66, 167-70 30, 31, 38-39, 73; Garden City AssociaInternational Garden Cities and Town tion and, 7; growth of, 83; Howard's ideal Planning Association, 28 and, 173; neighborhood unit and, 99International Planning History Society, 2 100; plan for, 109, zn, 112-13; quadranIrvine, California, 163 gle scheme at, 108; Stein on, 131; village green, 106; as "working model," 72-73 Jacobs, Jane, 65, 66, 164-65, 181-82, 230, Letchworth Garden City Heritage Founda2 tion, 73 39 Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, 61-62 Letchworth New Town, 145, 147, 259m 1 Jenkins, E., 151 Lever, William Hesketh, 1,61, 104 Johnson, Henry, 86 Lewis, Sinclair, Main Street, 58 Journal of the American Planning Association, Life and Labour ofthe People ofLondon (Booth), 2, 171 3 Light, William, 70 Kasson, John, 4-5 Lightmoor, Telford New Town, 231, 232 Katznelson, Ira, 51 limited dividend companies, 6 Kendands, Maryland, 185 Ling, Arthur G., 137, 144, 145 Kingsport, Tennessee, 167, 262n. 7 Listokin, David, 183 Kitimat, British Columbia, 152, 155 Little, Charles E., 88, 89 Kohn, Robert D., 125 Local Attachments (von Hoffman), 61-62 Kropotkin, Prince Peter, Fields, Factories and Local Government Commission, California, Workshops, 23 184

283

Moravians, loo Location Efficient Mortgage Partnership, 197 Morris, William, 18, 20, 32, 99, 100, 102-3 Lock, David, 234 Mumford, Lewis: Adams and, 84; The City London: Crow and, 76-77; Greater Lon(film), 175; The City in History, 56-57, don Plan, 79, 80; in nineteenth-century, 175, 218, 219, 220-21; Culture of Cities, 2-3, 222 I6OVL. 7; on garden suburbs, 161; on Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (Bellamy), 4, Howard, 66, 224; introduction to Garden 5-6,18,103 Cities of To-morrow by, 2, 13; Jacobs and, Los Angeles, California, 62 65, 164-65, 230; on New Towns, 64-65; Lost City (Ehrenhalt), 62 on Nolen, 167; Radburn plan and, 137, Lutyens, Edwin, 133 163; on size of garden city, 58; on Toward New Townsfor America, 164 MacFadyen, Dugald, 15 Munzer, Martha E., 179 MacKaye, Benton, 86, 88 MacMahon, Aline, 132, 138 Nash, John, 100,101 Magnetic Los Angeles (Hise), 62 National Evib and Practical Remedies (BuckMain Street (Lewis), 58 ingham), 6-7, 18 mangrove forests, 203-4 Nationalisation of Labour Society, 4, 19 "Manhattan transfer," 132, 26on. 4 Natural Resources Defense Council, 197 Margaretenhohe, Germany, 73-74 nature: human relationship to, 16-17, 202, Mariemont, Ohio, 167,168, 264J1. 26 204, 219, 226; wealth and, 206 Marne la Vallee, France, 198 neighborhood: "Artisans' Quarter" and, Marshall, Alfred, 6, 18, 41, 59, 60 115, 116; Cumbernauld New Town and, Marx, Karl, 41 148; formulation of concept of, 99-100; Maryland, 185, 197-98, 209, 210, 211. See Letchworth plan and, 109; Unwin and, also Columbia, Maryland; Greenbelt, 115-16, 120, 124. See also neighborhood Maryland unit Mashpee Commons, Massachusetts, 185, Neighborhood and Community Planning 190-92,191 (Perry), 173 Massachusetts Trustees of Public Reservaneighborhood unit, 124-30, 163, 165, 173, tions, 75 776-77, 199 Massengale, John Montague, 165-66 Netherlands, 235, 236-37 "Master Key" concept, 20-21, 21, 25-28, Neville, Ralph, 32 211-12 New Earswick, York, 32, 73-74, 105, 109, May, Ernst, 73-74, 90 770, 125 Mayer, Albert, 152,155 New Jersey, 181, 182, 209, 210, 211 McHarg, Ian, Design with Nature, 88 NewsfromNowhere (Morris), 102, 103 Mearns, Andrew, The Bitter Cry of Outcast New Towns: Building CitiesfromScratch London, 3 (Munzer and Vogel), 179 Mears, F. C, 123 New Towns after the War, 11,34 Meath, Lord, 74 New Townsfor Old (Nolen), 26411. 33 mega-urbanization, 93 New Urbanism: aim of best of, 66; AmeriMelrose Commons, New York, 185,188-90 can new town tradition and, 160-61, metropolis, critique of unbounded nine167-68; concerns of, 59, 262m 4; density teenth century, 59-61 and, 239, 241; garden city ideas and, 165; Millthorpe, 102, 103 historical theory of, 159-60; informal deModel Subdivision Regulations (Freilich and sign and, 167-69; neighborhood unit Shultz), 182 and, 199; Nolen and, 166-67; parkways

284

Index

New Urbanism (continued) Parsons, Kermit C, 9,175, 177 and, 76; players in, 184; promise of, 170; "patchwork city," 93 Radburn plan and, 263m 20; tenets of, Paxton, Joseph, 7 185-86 pedestrian path system.^Scc footpaths New York City, 183, 213, 222 Pepler, George, 74, 84 New York Regional Plan, 84 Pereira, William, 163 Next American Metropolis (Calthorpe), 94,95 Perry, Clarence: Adams and, 100, 115; influNieuw Sloten, Netherlands, 236 ences on, 124-25; neighborhood unit Nolen, John, 161-62, 165, 166-68, 239, and, 99, 163, 173, 776-77, 199 264ml. 24, 33 Perth, Western Australia, 74 Northern Ireland, 224 Picturesque revival, 100-101,104-5 Nos Quedamos, 189-90 Piedmont Crescent cities, North Carolina, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding (Unwin), 86 Pixmore Estates, England, 112, 775 73, 108, 109, 116, 120 Planet Drum Foundation, 206, 208, 212 Nystrom, Louise, 238 planned unit developments (PUDs), 132, 158, 179-81 O'Connor, Feargus, 100 planning: anriplanning activism, 230-31; Olmsted, Frederick Law, Jr., 162, 166-67, city and regional, 13, 228; hierarchical 264n. 24 principles of, 228; holistic approach to, Olmsted, Frederick Law, Sr., 61, 75, 162, 227-28; Howard's influence on, 2, 9, 10, 167, 213, 249m 22 12-13, 32-33, 37, 98, 171-72, 199-200, Olmsted, John C, 75 224-29; imbalance of, 244; new paradigm O'Rourke, Horace, 120 for, 232-33; town planning, 32-33, 51; Osborn, Frederic J.: archives of, 15-16; Arts Unwin and, 105-6 and Crafts movement and, 103; Garden Cities ofTo-morrow and, 2,215; Howard Planning for Man and Motor (Ritter), 146 Planning Magazine, 182 and, 20, 28, 33; on Welwyn Garden City, Planning Neighborhoods for Small Houses 34 (FHA), 175 Ottawa, Canada, 90 Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth, 165, 184, 190 Our Common Future, 232 Pond, Irving K, 124 Owen, Robert, 217 Portland, Oregon, 66, 91, 94, 213, 242 Owens, Susan, 234 Port Sunlight, Liverpool, 1, 61, 104 Oxford, England, 80, 81 ozone layer, 202-3 Progress and Poverty (George), 6, 18 pro-growth strategies, 209-10 project review/approval, 195, 197 Paris, France, 225-26, 226, 238 Prospect Park Alliance, Brooklyn, 213 parkbelts, 73-74 Parker, Barry: The Art ofBuilding a Home, public realm. See community Public Technologies, Inc., 205, 206 105; Garden City Association and, 32; Public Works Administration (U.S.), 175 Howard and, 224-25; neighborhood unit Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore, 101 and, 99-100, 125, 127, 128, 729, 129-30; Purdom, Charles, 33, 76-77,104, 109, 177 St. Andrew's Church and, 103; Unwin and, 259m 1; visit to United States, 125. quadrangle scheme, 107-9,107~8 See also Letchworth Garden City; New Earswick, York Radberg, Johan, 238 parkland town, 70-71 Radburn, New Jersey: automobile and, 64; park movement, 75-76

Index

>85

Rookwood, Ralph, 94-96,96 criticism of, 263^ 20; design of, 128, Rossant, James, 152,153 133-35,134; as garden suburb, 161,162; Rouse,James, 152, 154, 177, 179 influences on, 115, 779 Rowntree, Joseph, 109, 259n. 1 Radburn plan: adaptations of, 139, 141-47, Rowntree, Seebohm, 109 157-58; Columbia plan compared to, Runcorn New Town, 151 155,157; Cumbernauld plan and, 147Ruskin, John, 5, 32, 99, 100, 101-2 50; Howard's ideal and, 173; as model, Russia, greenbelts in, 79 163; Reston plan compared to, 152, 15455; view of in Britain, 151 Sacramento, California, 94 radicalism, 41 Santayana, George, 216 Radisson, New York, 263m 11 satellite town system, 76-77 Raleigh, North Carolina, 88 Schaffer, Daniel, 171-72 Ramsey, Charles G., 195 Schmidheiny, Stephan, 211, 212 Rapkin, Chester, 179 Schumacher, E. E, 231 Reade, Charles, 74, 84, 225 Schumacher, Fritz, 76 reform, failure of, 223-24 Schiingelburg, Germany, 239, 242 regional city, 86-88, 87 Schuyler, David, 186 Regional Planning Association of America, Scott, M. H. Baillie, 108 125, 132, 162, 259^ 3 Scully, Vincent, 160 Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, 10, 115 Search for Environment, The (Creese), 100 Seaside, Florida, 159, 165, 185, 195 regional survey, 52, 54 Seattle, Washington, 75, 206, 208, 242, 243 Regional Survey ofNew York and Its Environs, Sellier, Henri, 238 100 Seoul, South Korea, 79 Region at Risk, A (Regional Plan AssociaSesame and Lilies (Ruskin), 5 tion), 212 Sharp, Thomas, 77 Reps, John, 70 Shaw, George Bernard, 17 Resettlement Administration (U.S.), 77, "shopping center," 247n. 22 167, 168 shopping mall, 228-29 residential density. See density, residential Shultz, Michael, 182 resistance to change, 216-17, 239 Simon, Robert, 152, 154, 177, 179 Reston, Virginia: design of, 152-55,153, Singapore, 198, 199, 244 158, 179, 180; as example of garden city, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, 170 44; informal design and, 169-70; RadSleeper, Harold R., 195 burn plan and, 163, 177 Smart Growth (Urban Land Institute), 184 Reston (Washington Center for MetropoliSmart Growth Network, 184, 209-10 tan Studies), 179 Smart Investmentsfor City and County ManRhees, Suzanne, 161 agers (EPA), 209 Richards, J. M., 139,143 Smith, Clothiel Woodward, 153 Richardson, Benjamin Ward, Hygeia, 18,41 "Social City" diagram, 22, 66, 71, 72, 228 Richmond, Cora, 17, 20 socialism, 20-23, 30,101, 168 Riis, Jacob, How the Other HalfLives, 3 Socialist League, 102, 103 Rio Earth Summit, 233 Social Statistics (Spencer), 6, 18 Ritter, Paul, 137, 146 Society Hill, New Jersey, 181 Riverside, Illinois, 162, 167, 249m 22 soil degradation and desertification, 204 Robertson, Jacquelin, 187, 188 Soisson, Louis de, 125, 126 Rogers, Lord, 235

286

Index

Index

Somerleyton, Suffolk, ioo, 707 206-8, 212, 217; Breheny, Rookwood, Sonoma, California, 91 and, 94-96,96; in Britain, 233-35; South Florida Regional Planning Council, greenbelts and, 82; industrial ecology 210, 212 and, 214; as new paradigm for planning, 232-33; private sector and, 211 species loss, 203 Sustainable Seattle, 206, 208 Spence, Thomas, 6,18 sustainable urban development: definition Spencer, Herbert, Social Statistics, 6,18 of, 233; in Europe, 235-39, 241, 242; in spiritualism, 17 United States, 243-44 St. Andrew's Church, England, 103 Sutton Hall, 103 St. George's Farm, England, 102 Swan Sonnenschein, 1, 4, 20 "stakeholder process," 212-13' Sweden, 237-38, 240. See also Stockholm, Starbeck, Yorkshire, 108-9 Sweden Staveley Coal and Iron Company, England, Sydney, Australia, 78 103 Stein, Clarence: awards of, 262n. 45; BaldTampines, Singapore, 198,199 win Hills Village, California, 145; block Taylor, Samuel Pointon, 115 system and, 135,136; economic issues and, 168; garden city and, 161-62; influTaylorism, 173 ence of, 132, 158; influence on Reston Tennenbaum, Robert, 179 and Columbia planners, 155; Kitimat and, Tennessee Valley Authority, 175, 26411. 27 152; neighborhood unit and, 99, 163; Thatcher (Margaret) administration, 79, 22 2 New Urbanist critique of, 165-66; re4. 34 gional city and, 86, 87; Stephenson and, Three Magnets diagram, 23, 24, 25, 26, 42, 137-38; Stevenage NewTbwn and, 138, 172 139,140; Toward New Towns for America, Time-Saver Standards for Housing and Resi87-88, 135,138, 164, 175; training of, dential Development (De Chiara), 183 26411. 24; Unwin and, 259m 1; visit to Tokyo, Japan, 79 England, 125, 131, 132. See also Radburn, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform New Jersey (Howard): anniversary of, 171; critics of, Stephenson, Gordon, 87-88, 135, 137-38, 5, 28; influence of, 2, 8, 12-13, 28; influences on, 6-7,40-42,103-4; introduc139. ^°. H1 Stern, Robert A. M., 187,188 tion to, 3; publication of, 20; success of, 1. Stevenage New Town, 137, 138-39, 140, See also Garden Cities of To-morrow (How145, 146, 175 ard); garden city Stockholm, Sweden, 150, 229, 237-38, 238, Tbnnies, Ferdinand, 45 240 Toward New Towns for America (Stein), 87streets, 213-14 88, 135, 138, 164, 175 Subdivision and Site Plan Handbook (ListokinTown and Country Planning Association, 2 and Walker), 183 3i. 234 town-country magnet concept, 26, 45, 50, Suburban Nation, 160 66, 72, 205-6 Sunnyside Gardens, New York, 135, 136, town planning, 32-33, 51 173 Town Planning in Practice (Unwin), 73, 112, superblock. See block system l6 Suresnes, France, 225-26, 226, 238 S. 173 Surface Transportation Policy Project, 197 Town Planning Review, 87-88, 135, 137 Sustainable Development, 184 Town Theory and Practice (Purdom), 177 trade unionism, 21-22 sustainable development: advocates for, 205,

Traditional Neighborhood Design Series, Trafford Park, Manchester, 229 transfer of developmentrights,191-92 transit-oriented development, 66, 94, 239, 241 Truman Show, The (film), 195 Tugwell, Rexford Guy, 77 Tyrone, New Mexico, 264H. 24

287

195 Venice, Florida, 166,167, 264x1. 29 village concept, 100-101, 105-13, 218 village green concept, 105 Vivian, Henry, 115, 120 Vogel,John,Jr., 179 von Hoffman, Alexander, Local Attachments, 61-62 Voorhees, Alan, 179

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Wade, Charles Paget, 115 Development, 188-89 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 6, 18 Walker, Carol, 183 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Walker, Hale, 167 184, 209 ultraviolet radiation, 203 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 18 Union Gap, New Jersey, 180-81 Ward, Colin, 234, 239 United Nations, 205-6, 211 Ward, Stephen, 2, 177 Unwin, Raymond: Carpenter and, 102, 103; ward concept. See neighborhood unit footpaths of, 26on. 5; Garden City AssoWashington, D.C., 84, 86 ciation and, 32; Geddes and, 120,123, Washington New Town, 227 124; Greater London Regional Planning Webb, Sydney, 17 Committee and, 74-75; green girdle and, Weber, Adna F, 3 74-75; highway hierarchy of, 120, 124Welshes Farm Estate, Stourport, 143,143, 30; Howard and, 224-25; Morris and, H5 102-3; neighborhood and, 99-100, 115Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire: com16, 120, 124; parkbelt and, 73; Parker promises of, 223-24; establishment of, and, 259m 1; regional survey and, 54; St. 28, 33-37,35; Howard in, 14-15; neighAndrew's Church and, 103; Stein and, borhood concept and, 125, 126, 727; 131, 259m 1; on villages, 105-7; visit to Stein on, 131 United States, 124, 125. Works: The Art Westholm Green, England, 109, 772 ofBuilding a Home, 105, 706, 120; Cottage Wesdake Village, California, 163 Plans and Common Sense, 107-8, 108; CotWestminster Place, Missouri, 181 tages near a Town, 108-9; Nothing GainedWhitman, Christine Todd, 210, 211 by Overcrowding, 73, 108, 109, 116, 120; Whittlesey, Julian, 152, 155 Town Planning in Practice, 73, 112, 165, Whyte, William H., 84, 86, 97, 164 173; Wright and, 131. See also LetchWillenhall Wood, Coventry, 144, 145 worth Garden City; New Earswick, York Wilson, Hugh, 137 urban growth boundary, 91, 94,95 Womersley, J. L., 142, 143 Urban Land Institute, 182, 184 Woodlands, Texas, 157 urban population, 202, 222-23, 244 Works Progress Administration (U.S.), 175 urban sprawl, 183-84 Wren, Christopher, i n Utopian and dystopian novels, 4-5 Wrexham, Wales, 135,139,141 Utrecht, Netherlands, 236 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 41,124 Wright, Henry: block system and, 135, 136; Valencia, California, 163,169-70 influence of, 158; neighborhood unit and, Vallingby, Sweden, 237 99, 163; review of New Towns for Old by, Vancouver, British Columbia, 91,92, 93 264x1. 33; visit to England, 125, 131. See vehicle. See automobile also Radburn, New Jersey

288

Index

Writings of Clarence S. Stein, The (Parsons), Zetetical Society, 17, 18 zoning overlays, 191-92 I7S.I77 Wyndham, Virginia, 181 Wythenshawe, Manchester, 125, 127, 128, 129-30,129

OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES Arnold R. Alanen and Robert Z. Melnick, eds., Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America Gail Lee Dubrow and Jennifer Goodman, eds., Restoring Women's History through Historic Preservation Kenneth Helphand, Dreaming Gardens: Landscape Architecture and the Creation of the Israeli Landscape Kenneth Kolson, Big Plans: The Allure and Folly of Urban Development Forster Ndubisi, Approaches to Ecological Planning: A Historic and Comparative Account Joan Woodward, Waterstained Landscapes: Seeing and Shaping Regionally Distinctive Places