From the Garden City to the Smart City

Stephan Hügel

doi:10.17645/up.v2i3.1072

Abstract

It has been a century since the first Garden Cities at Welwyn and Letchworth were founded and, in the eyes of many, we have entered the age of the Smart City. This commentary briefly reflects upon the origins of Ebenezer Howard’s vision in the slums of overcrowded, filthy London and the fire-traps of early 20th century Chicago before outlining some of the main contributing factors to its ultimate failure as an approach: the lack of a robust theory underpinning his ideas, a finance model which was unacceptable to the banks—leading to a compromise which robbed the more idealistic participants of any real power over their schemes—and finally, a dilution of Howard’s vision by architects who were more focused on population density than on social reform. A parallel is then drawn between the weaknesses which afflicted the Garden City vision, and those which afflict current Smart City visions, a loose agglomeration of ahistorical techno-utopian imaginaries, whose aims almost invariably include optimising various measures of efficiency using large-scale deployments of networked sensors and cameras, linked to monolithic control rooms from which our shared urban existence is overseen. The evolution (or perhaps more accurately: alteration) of these concepts in response to criticism is then detailed, before some of the less well-known ideas which are now emerging are briefly discussed.

Highlights

Returning to London in 1876, Ebenezer Howard, an English clerk who had gone to the United States to work first as a farmer, and later as a journalist, having witnessed the rebuilding of Chicago following a major fire in the 1870s, became convinced that a new departure was required in the planning and construction of cities
Howard recognized that people did not want to live in the overcrowded, dirty, expensive cities of the late 19th century, their living conditions in these rapidlyexpanding metropolises having been vividly illustrated by publications such as Andrew Mearns’s 1885 pamphlet, Urban Planning, 2017, Volume 2, Issue 3, Pages 1–4
Howard recognized that life in the countryside held few attractions for city-dwellers. He was by no means alone in his desire for an alternative: as Schuyler points out (Parsons & Schuyler, 2002, p. 4), “In the 1880s and 1890s, more than 100 utopian and dystopian novels were published in Great Britain”, many of them including “visions of a society in which the world enjoyed peace”

Summary

Introduction

Returning to London in 1876, Ebenezer Howard, an English clerk who had gone to the United States to work first as a farmer, and later as a journalist, having witnessed the rebuilding of Chicago following a major fire in the 1870s, became convinced that a new departure was required in the planning and construction of cities. Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin would come to exert the most influence on the built realization of Howard’s vision at Letchworth: Howard’s physical vision of the garden city had been quite crude, its focus having been on social reform, and this was quickly ‘rectified’ by Unwin and Parker, who reformulated key aspects of Howard’s initial ideas, especially those around urban density These changes, which together had significantly altered Howard’s vision—even leading to a re-titling of subsequent editions of his book to Garden Cities of To-Morrow—coincided with a wider shift towards what was referred to, from 1905 onwards This is partially because Howard himself lacked the personal authority to champion his ideals in the face of competing imperatives, driven by financiers (no matter how socially-minded), architects, and town planners

The Age of the Smart City

Beyond Familiar Paradigms