Regenerating the ‘Stock’ of the Empire: Biopower and Physical Culture in English Garden City Planning Discourse, 1898-1903

Abstract

In 1898, British social reformer Ebenezer Howard published To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, calling for ‘garden city’ communities based on the principles of decentralized industry, urban resettlement, low-density housing, and a ‘healthy’ combination of town and country life. To-morrow catalyzed an international movement that continues to influence urban planning. To date, historians have devoted scant attention to the role of physical culture in garden city history and the lead up to the first garden city at Letchworth in 1903. For Howard and movement supporters, the healthfulness of garden cities depended on surrounding each community, its social activities, and its prescribed forms of physical culture with preserved English countryside. This idealizing of bucolic spaces led industrialists and political leaders to embrace the model and incorporate it in their broader political agendas centered on working-class degeneration and strengthening the physical ‘stock’ of the British Empire. This essay examines the role of physical culture in the history of garden city movement discourse between 1898 and 1903. By examining the history through the lens of physical culture, it is argued that garden cities represented a spatialized strategy of modern biopower, as planners sought to regulate working-class life.