Abstract
Recent renewed discussions of the garden city as a “developmental model for the present and foreseeable future” (Stern, Fishman, &amp; Tilove, 2013) have prompted us to reflect upon its endurance as an agent of spatial and urban reform. Looking to extend the established garden city literature, we argue the history of Ebenezer Howard’s community model should be reexamined as a cultural history of body and environmental politics. In this commentary, we explicate how Howard’s garden city model served as a spatial vehicle for installing the biopolitical agendas of Victorian reformers keen to “civilize” working class bodies in the service of British industrial and imperial power. This entails a brief examination of the biopolitical dimensions of garden city history, keying on the prescribed restructuring of urban life and the concomitant “regeneration” of working class bodies within and through garden city designs. Our aim is to challenge scholars, planners, and policymakers of the garden city <em>present</em>, to consider the ways the garden city was historically planned to reproduce the cultural, spatial, and biopolitical relations of Western capitalism.
Highlights
Planning is an exercise of power. (White, 1995)In September 2014 the international politics magazine Foreign Policy reported on the revival of Sir Ebenezer Howard’s (1898) “garden city” as a fruitful model for sustainable urban planning (Hurley, 2014)
The garden city is experiencing something of a twenty-first century renaissance
While it may be overlooked in its contemporaneous iterations, from its inception the garden city incorporated a biopolitics prefigured on the liberation of urban working class bodies from the debilitating shackles of urban industrialization, through their prescribed relocation to planned communities balancing “town” and “country” life
Summary
In September 2014 the international politics magazine Foreign Policy reported on the revival of Sir Ebenezer Howard’s (1898) “garden city” as a fruitful model for sustainable urban planning (Hurley, 2014). In Hurley’s (2014) and Stern, Fishman and Tilove’s (2013) contemporary accounts, the garden city is strictly an agent of spatial and urban reform: an influential experiment in potentially sustainable community building, prefigured on the planning and execution of: “well-built homes for people of diverse means,” “clean air and ample green space,” and a local, ample “employment, education, and culture...” (Hurley, 2014) While each of these elements incorporates an embodied dimension— in their goal of improving the health and well-being of community residents—the patrician pathologizing of urban bodies and cultures so engrained within Howard’s philosophy is largely overlooked. Within the remainder of this commentary, we offer insights into how the garden city movement was shaped by Howard’s and the planners’ biopolitical agenda, as they sought to constitute “naturally healthy” spaces of living designed to ameliorate the deficiencies of urban working class bodies and cultures
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