The garden city as eugenic utopia

Abstract

The exploitation of town planning and architecture for the objectives of race hygiene is decades older than the Third Reich. The idea of selective human breeding, propagated by Galton, Ploetz and others, appeared in one of Ebenezer Howard's diagrams of 1898, then more explicitly in the German garden cities organisation, where around 1910 the leading German eugenists were members of the board. In the 1920s, the myth of ‘New Man’ was riddled with eugenic thought in the ideological foundation of the whole reform architecture movement and the later Neues Bauen. One of the practical results during the Third Reich was a siedlung in Bremen, which was a garden‐city, a half‐open prison and a eugenistic selection centre all in one. Even in the 1950s the eugenic argument in the German housing and planning debate was still present.