Abstract

The garden city is often presented as a low-density, unsustainable and space-consuming archetype of suburbanization (Duany, Roberts, & Tallen, 2014; Hall, 2014; Safdie & Kohn, 1997). It has been deliberately also misused by property developers for gated communities (Le Goix, 2003; Webster, 2001). But these projects have little in common with the original concept of garden cities. We argue that the original garden city, as a theory (Howard, 1898) and as experiments (Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities), is a precedent that can be used in a sustainable approach that addresses a range of issues and concerns, such as housing, governance, the economy, mobility, the community, agriculture, energy and health. The recent Wolfson Economics Prize (2014) and the many new garden cities and suburbs projects currently planned in the UK have demonstrated the resurgence of this model in the planning world, both in terms of theory and practice. In this paper, we explore its potential in the light of environmental challenges. We therefore suggest that as a model, it can in particular underpin the evolution of suburbs in an era of energy transition, since these areas require an ecosystemic rather than sectoral approach to design.

Highlights

  • The term “suburb”—and its French equivalent “périurbain”—is used in the Anglosphere to describe the peripheral urbanization that came about in the main English and American cities since the late 19th century

  • Urban dispersion strategies moved away from the principles behind the traditional city and the values borne by the original garden cities model, and gradually moved closer to the most problematic suburb characteristics mentioned above, and so, to this day, public opinion and professionals continue to associate garden cities with the problems posed by new towns and suburbs (Barkham, 2016; Holliss, 2017)

  • Howard’s comprehensive approach to urban complexity beyond spatialization, as well as the influence of theory and artifacts constructed through the history of urban planning, explains the continuous interest about the precedent of garden cities for more than a century

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Summary

Introduction

The term “suburb”—and its French equivalent “périurbain”—is used in the Anglosphere to describe the peripheral urbanization that came about in the main English and American cities since the late 19th century. Anne Coste explains that, in the realm of architecture— and by extension that of urbanism—a model can serve many purposes: it can be used to design, to represent or to understand She specifies that it can be of many types: “the archetype, which will be imitated or interpreted through the work of creation; the model or the small scale or otherwise representation or of an object...and, lastly the simplified representation of a process or system” The aim of this article is to evaluate the way the garden cities model sets a precedent which, through its historical evolution and the projects it has inspired, can be used to see beyond the usual issues attributed to suburban areas, in order to imagine a more sustainable path for the suburbs in the 21st century. More forward-looking, we will explain the theoretical foundations on which our researches are based, and we will present some keys to understand the potential of the garden cities model for conceiving sustainable alternatives for the contemporary suburbs

The Emergence of Suburbs in Great Britain
A Dispersion Strategy for Greater London Inspired by the Garden Cities Model
New Towns Planned as Alternatives to Suburbs
The Social and Environmental Downsides of Affinity Urbanism
Learn from the Past to Build the Future
URBED’s Interpretation
The New Urbanism Approach
Toward a Sustainable Path for Suburbs
From Territorial Metabolism to the Territorial Energy Ecosystem
Density as a Tool to Analyze the Equilibrium of the Urbanized Territory
From Spatial Expansion to Social Planning
From the Individual Carbon Footprint to the Collective Production of Energy
From a Delegation of Powers to a Complementarity of Actors
From Economic Dependence to Energy Autonomy
Findings
Conclusion
Full Text
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