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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/loo

\ooJ-Hii

© 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,ifi*>i*J.ts, t* j fv^ «>f*< t/r/.iH-ij ' t >%.%3i « »*• .' " - *'* Cent"

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4*14*1-1*1 " . i f , . •a ' ^ ' H '•

Figure 2. The Social City. This diagram shows both the social reformist basis of Howard's ideas and the regional network of garden cities that he envisaged. It appeared in To-morrow but not the second edition, Garden Cities of To-morrow. First Garden City Heritage Museum, Letchworth Garden City.

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

Stephen V. Ward

Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times

V

25

s 2 \T-rvr, t'CgjUg

•

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Figure 4. Version of the Three Magnets diagram in the typescript of To-morrow c. 1892. Ebenezer Howard Archive, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, Hertfordshire County Record Office. Figure 3. The first known version of the Three Magnets diagram, in Howard's first manuscript of To-morrow, c. 189^92. Ebenezer Howard Archive, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, Hertfordshire County Record Office.

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

Stephen V. Ward

Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times THE

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Twenty-one miles from Kinod to waste -two h o u r s daily m trams, = = 1 tmses and trams io and from the workshop, leaving = "=§" no iitne nor energy f o r l e i s u r e o r recreation. =§ .1*-T*^'*-ft*illA!Nki

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
1 i"

li' [|iii ml 1 "I f'l

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-

-m

T \\felwyn Garden City a man's house will be near J \ h i s work i n a -pure and healthy atmosphere.

He -will have time & energy ' ... . after his work is done for letsure-S-recreation

•~Sr ..- fvrfwltcufors ofHousing &• factory Sites apply to ~~'• =§• ""' ' Etttte Offices, Welwyn Gaofat Oty, Herts. fff '-•"., A",Reproduction of a futi-ptfe advertisement from the Summer Number of "Punch." Figure 10. Early promotional material for Welwyn Garden City (T920). Howard's fellow New Townsmen were horrified when they learned of his unilateral action to create a second garden city. They gave their support only on the understanding that it would be a demonstration model for town planning principles, with very little sense of any wider social reformism. Sir Frederic Osborn Archive, Welwyn Garden City Library.

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

36

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

41

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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

43

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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

47

48

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)

49

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

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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

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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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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

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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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Robert Fishman

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,

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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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Robert Fishman

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

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C i t y

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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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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"

2.

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4.

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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

83

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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Greenbelts in City and Regional Planning

85

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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Robert Freestone

Greenbelts in City and Regional Planning

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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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 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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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 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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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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-5 to 2 bo a d "fl D — G 0, o H 2 -32 -r. c/1 0> -a O .B 4-1 bo d 13 3 B.S - sg > o -a .52 bo a> -fl VI y bo 3 O fl bo 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

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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