A Study of Urban Size Control in the Japanese Understanding of Garden Cities in Early 1900s

Abstract

Despite the importance of compact cities in Japan, suburban development has flourished from the early days of urban planning to this day, making it difficult to achieve compact cities. Therefore, this study focuses on the philosophy of urban planning around 1919, when the City Planning Law was first made, as the root of the current situation. Just at that time, the garden city movement, the origin of the compact city, was occurring in Japan, and this study clarified how the garden city was interpreted in the early 1900s, focusing on the expansion of the city. The materials used were journals and academic books published between 1907, when the garden city was first introduced, and 1927, when the subject of urban planning shifted to park systems. To ensure that the articles were written by experts of the time with some sort of argument, so translated articles, visits, and textbooks are eliminated, and 29 discourses are used for analysis. The survey found that many experts gave little weight to Howard’s theory in their articles describing garden cities, and often referred to Letchworth, Bourneville, and Port Sunlight. This fact was because they saw the concentration of population in the cities and the resulting densification as the problem, not the expansion of the cities. Garden cities were seen as a solution to these problems, and so garden suburbs were favorably received as embodying the ideals of the garden city. Moreover, the green areas surrounding the garden city were understood to be places where people could enjoy the richness of nature. This is why the garden city did not lead to the compact city, but to the solution of developing residential areas in the suburbs.