Garden City Idea Research Articles

КОНЦЕПЦІЯ МІСТА-САДУ: ФОРМУВАННЯ І РОЗВИТОК НА ПОЛЬСЬКИХ ТЕРЕНАХ УПРОДОВЖ ПЕРШОЇ ЧВЕРТІ XX СТОЛІТТЯ

The article examines the formation and development of the garden city concept in Poland during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The experience of Polish architecture and urbanism in the context of the garden city idea before the First World War and in the first postwar years is highlighted. Examples of realized Polish garden cities, the activities of both individual figures and entire societies and organizations that promoted the garden city concession are described. The relevance of the topic is determined by the need to create a balanced and unified urban strategy for the restoration of Ukraine, which would have not only a proper legal basis, but also a strong value character, which is inherent in the garden city concept.

Lusaka: New Capital and the Imperial Garden City Movement

The colonial Garden City Movement represents the culmination of a whole sequence of relationships between botany and imperialism that had developed from the seventeenth century onwards, but particularly in the Victorian era. Botany was central to the transnationality of imperialism and botanical exploration while plant collecting fed into many Victorian phenomena in Britain which also had their colonial counterparts. These were intended to alleviate the social, environmental and medical evils of industrialism, providing a closer interaction between the rural and the urban. They included the creation of green belts, the founding of model villages, the emergence of municipal public parks and botanical gardens, and finally the garden city movement. By these means it was intended that industrial (and sometimes rural) workers should experience a healthier lifestyle, as well as a social uplift which would mitigate class conflict while also providing rational recreation. In the export of garden city ideas to the British Empire, there were additionally significant colonial precedents in street tree planting and in the beautification movement of the Victorian era and early twentieth century. This article specifically focuses upon the translation of aspects of this garden city movement and of these other influences into the creation of the new capital of Lusaka in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in the twentieth century and the manner in which a great diversity of both indigenous and exotic plants were used to express the idealistic characteristics of this urban development while also reflecting the social and racial norms inherent in the colonial relationship.

The Urban Future: Relating Garden City Ideas to the Climate Emergency

Climate emergency, landscape connectivity and rapid urbanization are among the major challenges of the 21st century. This paper discusses ways in which cities can respond to the changing climate and put in place a sustainable vision. It uses the garden city concept as a vehicle to investigate the future of our cities in relation to the climate emergency and the elements that urban centres need to provide. Cities and their wider regions are recognised as key actors in supporting systemic change and climate change governance, and therefore the scope of this paper is to explore contemporary models of garden cities and the ways in which these might be able to address climate emergency as well as the concepts of zero carbon and sustainability. The study uses the 2014 Wolfson Economics Prize, which was based on a garden city question. Taking an environmental perspective on the delivery of future cities, and using the competition essays and masterplans, this study produces analytical drawings aiming to unpack the concepts of sustainability and low carbon. This research concludes that the garden city concept can support the future needs of our settlements, but a 21st century approach needs to be developed. The social and economic ideas originally introduced at the end of the 19th century need to be updated as a holistic vision, including nature and biodiversity, climatic conditions, climate emergency adaptation and mitigation processes as well as community health and wellbeing, to be able to fully respond to the needs of the future.

Review: Cold War and Architecture: The Competing Forces That Reshaped Austria after 1945

Review: <i>Cold War and Architecture: The Competing Forces That Reshaped Austria after 1945</i>

Review: Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change

Review: <i>Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change</i>

The contribution of Welwyn Garden City to the international diffusion of the British garden city idea

The centenary of Welwyn Garden City is a good opportunity to take stock of the international diffusion of the British Garden City Movement and particularly the contribution of wgc as a global influencer, especially in the United States of America. The Movement has been much studied by architects, town planners and urban designers, and by urban and planning historians. Yet beyond professional circles and those that live in the garden cities, the British people remain largely unaware of the global influence of the two most important British garden cities of the twentieth century, namely Letchworth and Welwyn. The Garden City Movement impacted town planning globally, assisted in no small part by the contribution of the leading garden city advocate, Frederic Osborn.

Urbanism as Myth and Ceremony

Between 1929 and 1935, the Bata Shoe Company planned the construction of a series of modern industrial satellite towns in Europe, Asia, and America. By 1935, however, their development was far from advanced, and their original town plans, following a modernist grid, had been replaced with new ones, based on garden city ideas. A transnational explanation of the conditions that complicated their construction and motivated changes in their design remains as a gap in the existing literature on the Bata Shoe Company. The conceptual framework of sociological institutionalism is used to study how questions of meaning and social legitimacy influenced the design and construction of Bata’s industrial towns in the 1930s. The methodology employed involved the triangulation of the study of secondary sources and research into Bata’s archives, with the analysis of how the urban form of the towns changed through time. The research reveals the institutionalization of ideas on urban planning and architecture within Bata’s structure, and the role of external legitimation in justifying their utilization or withdrawal. Finally, this article will posit that interdisciplinary readings on contemporary urban history can bring new insights into the transformation of the built environment by multinational organizations.

The origin and development of Garden cities: An overview

An overview of Garden City development as well as its significance in urban planning, are given in this paper. The Garden City idea, which had a major role in the 20th century urbanism, was born in London. The author of this concept is Ebezener Howard who is considered a pioneer of modern urban planning.

URBANISTIKOS PROFESINIO DISKURSO RAIDA SPECIALIZUOTOJE SPAUDOJE TARPUKARIO LIETUVOS RESPUBLIKOJE (1918–1940) / EVOLUTION OF THE PROFESSIONAL DISCOURSE OF URBAN PLANNING IN THE SPECIALIZED PRESS IN THE INTERWAR LITHUANIAN REPUBLIC (1918–1940)

Urban planning in the interwar Lithuanian republic is still lacking a wider research. National school of the discipline was developing in difficult conditions, without most of the needed resources. A theoretical and critical basis was developing parallelly, which was in search of it’s own ideal model of urban planning. Article looks at the genesis of theoretical aspect of urban planning in the interwar specialized periodical press, reviews different periods of it’s development and tries to find the main problems it faced and the ideals it favored. Throughout the research the development of urban planning theory is split into four distinct chronological periods, that correlated with physical processes. The big break was the new generation of those interested in urban planning – the 30’s saw emergence of criticism of chaotic development processes that were taking place in Lithuanian cities and also the new ideas that were reminiscence of theoretical tendencies of contemporary Europe. A wider form of theoretical discourse has formed until the start of occupations, that could be seen as a rudimentary polemic field of national school of urban planning. The idea of garden city can be seen as a constant of the whole interwar period, which, while varied from author to author, nevertheless always included the main, simplified elements of the simplified concept.

Społeczne aspekty miejskiego zagospodarowania przestrzeni w kontekście zdrowia środowiskowego – od koncepcji miast ogrodów po współczesne ruchy społeczne

1. Dubos R. Człowiek, środowisko, adaptacja. Warszawa: Państwowy Zakład Wydawnictw Lekarskich; 1970. Google Scholar

How ideas work: memes and institutional material in the first 100 years of the neighborhood unit

This paper reviews the history of the neighborhood unit idea, primarily in the United States and United Kingdom, as a means to examine how urban design ideas work. It argues that ideas like the neighborhood unit gain their power by framing the institutional material we create to help us cope with work. Institutional material refers to cultural product that conditions human action. Types of institutional material in urban design include practice norms, professional communities, and governance structures. Although the neighborhood unit emerged through a transatlantic network of planners and designers, the institutional material it framed was particular, local, and contingent. Ultimately, the paper argues that the neighborhood unit grew out of institutional material in the early 20th century that itself was influenced by the garden city, and that both neighborhood unit and garden city ideas continued to shape new institutional material in subsequent decades.

Peter Scott. The Making of the Modern British Home: The Suburban Semi and Family Life between the Wars.

Peter Scott presents in this book a revisionary history of the genesis of the modern British suburb which concentrates especially on how, in the decades between the two world wars, large sections of the British working classes became suburbanites. The author dismantles the often-heard opinion that modern suburbs were primarily a middle-class phenomenon. As such, they were financially beyond the reach of even the upper layers of the working classes even if developers, politicians, real estate agents, and building societies tried to recklessly impose the suburban way of life onto them. Eschewing any a priori dismissive or appreciative attitude toward suburbs, Scott relies instead on datasets like, for example, 600 returns from “Britain's first detailed national household expenditure survey, conducted by the Ministry of Labour over the year beginning October 1937” (p. vii). Other sources include personal testimonies, such as interviews, biographies, and contributions to oral history projects, from migrants who moved into suburbs. The main thesis of the book is that the interwar years were characterized by a process of suburbanization that allowed approximately 25 percent “of non-agricultural British working-class households [to] move to suburban estates … with around 13 per cent taking the municipal housing route to suburbia, around 9 per cent taking the mortgage route, and perhaps 3 per cent renting privately developed suburban housing” (p. 10). Even more, the end of the Great War brought with it the end of terraced housing, until then one of Britain's favorite types of building for housing the working classes and sections of the middle classes. Drawing on prewar garden city ideas, the new suburban housing was mostly low-density, short terraces, and especially “semis,” or semi-detached houses. Finally, Scott traces in great detail the manifold social changes that came with swapping urban housing for suburban homes. “[A] new form of working-class respectability emerged, based around maintaining minimum accepted standards of dress and other visible markers of consumption, restrained speech and behaviour, high standards of personal and domestic hygiene, ‘privatized’ family- and home-centred lifestyles, and an increased commitment of resources to the welfare and material advancement of the next generation” (p. 11).

Garden cities in the Jewish Yishuv of Palestine: Zionist ideology and practice 1905–1945

The Garden City Movement is recognized as a dominant forerunner of modern urban planning. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the broad popularity and selective adoption of Garden City concepts in Zionist circles and the Jewish Yishuv (Community) in Palestine, to document their implementation in Jewish urban settlement in Palestine, and to follow their local evolution into the creation of a unique urban fabric. We show how the Garden City ideology and its implementation in England and Germany influenced the Zionist movement, its leaders, and settlers in Ottoman and British Mandatory Palestine, and led them to adopt and adapt concepts of the Garden City model as the ‘national paradigm’ of the new Jewish urban planning in Palestine. The planning was influenced by Garden City ideas, with modifications to Ebenezer Howard's original model made to suit local traditions, public demand, and Zionist goals. The application of the message of the Garden City movement to the physical model beginning unintentionally with the building of Ahuzat Bayit (Tel Aviv) in 1909, created a guiding principle for Jewish urban development in Palestine from 1905 until 1945, and continues to exert its influence on current planning. In conclusion, the article adds a dimension to the emerging picture of early twentieth-century Zionist settlement in Palestine as a laboratory for implementing novel planning ideas of international importance.

Garden cities in colonial Africa: a note on historiography

While there is an abundance of published literature on the diffusion of planning modes and garden city notions in the western world, the corresponding literature on colonial (sub-Saharan) Africa is rather sparse. This brief paper, dealing with major historiographic trends in urban space and segregation in light of garden city literature proposes new directions for critical research on garden cities in colonial Africa. Both thematically and methodologically, the paper will highlight the importance of studying the influences of garden city ideas beyond the global North–West, and understanding the channels through which they were passed on to various colonial contexts in Africa, the circumstances of their application and the political interests they were meant to serve.

The garden city idea in the CIAM discourse on urbanism: a path to comprehensive planning

Over a period of three decades, from 1928 to 1959, the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) formed an unconventional working team and a complex laboratory of progressive ideas for designing the city. During the founding years of the organization and the transatlantic emigration of many of its major figures during the second half of the 1930s, a profound engagement with the most important trends in the European and North American debates on planning had become the critical foundation for their common task. The organization's consequent basic convictions and demands summed up the most effective maxims of the discipline since the turn of the century. Officially, CIAM tried to distinguish itself from traditional urban planning and instead advocated modern urban planning as the antithesis to everything that existed previously. Seen from a historical perspective, however, numerous points of connection – in particular to the garden city movement – become very clear. The various members of CIAM were deeply influenced ideologically by Ebenezer Howard's visions for urbanism. Personal contact to representatives of the garden city movement, active involvement in its institutions, and broad implementation of Howard's ideas in the context of European and North American planning led CIAM from the analysis of the functions of the existing city to a comprehensive design of the modern city.

Happy homes and stable society. Otto‐Iivari Meurman and omakoti in interwar Finland

The focus of the article is on small single‐family houses (omakoti) and their status and significance in interwar Finnish urban planning and the social situation at the time. The idea of omakoti, its international points of contact and practical implementation are viewed through the work of the architect Otto‐Iivari Meurman (1890–1994) as a planner of small Finnish towns. Meurman graduated on the eve of the First World War in 1914. After assisting in the office of Eliel Saarinen, Meurman worked as the town planning architect of Viipuri from 1918 to 1937. Later he became the first professor of town planning in the Nordic countries and maybe the most influential planner in twentieth‐century Finland. The newly independent Finland experienced a traumatic Civil War in 1918. The article shows how after the war single‐family houses and home‐ownership were regarded as bearers of social stability and as signs of loyal citizens in the Finnish housing discussion. For Meurman, residential areas were central to the development of society. A nuclear family with children living in a single‐family house surrounded by a garden was the normative unit of society for Meurman. His work as a planner gives an opportunity to outline how omakoti became a symbol of the good life and stable society in interwar Finland. Finnish architects sought housing models from Sweden, Germany and the UK. The importance for Meurman of Garden City ideas lay in their flexibility to be used as a way of promoting single‐family housing.

Just beyond the fringe: Churchill Park garden suburb in St. John's, Newfoundland

In the late nineteenth century, Canada suburbs were home to a wide diversity of residents. By the middle of the twentieth century, this widespread pluralism had largely disappeared. Suburbia became the vanguard of the modern, segregated city. Individual suburbs became more regulated, more 'planned' and more middle class (McCann 1999). The gradual loss of suburban living opportunities for Canada's working class population has been called a national 'tragedy' (Harris 1996). Suburbs were originally characterised by housing types not entirely different from those found closer to the urban core, but the 'garden suburb' tradition came to dominate Western cities during the twentieth century. The essence of the garden suburb model was a single-detached house in a private garden, which seemed the perfect way of catering to the desire for living accommodation in the romantic tradition of rus in urbe. The widespread adoption of the garden suburb model transformed streetscape into landscape (Whitehand and Carr 1999, 77). This model, based on the Garden City idea, popularised in Ebenezer Howard's (1965) classic 1902 work Garden Cities of Tomorrow was well known by intellectuals in Canada but arrived in a more formal sense when Thomas Adams came to take up his new position as Town Planning Advisor to the Federal Government's Commission of Conservation in 1915 (Simpson 1985; Stein 1994). During the early years of the twentieth century, Canadian municipal reformers were preoccupied with the problem of slum clearance. Planning was still in its infancy, but it was generally agreed that the best, cheapest and most politically acceptable solution to the 'slum problem' was to build new housing on the suburban fringe (Ravetz 1995) relying on a process that would later be referred to as 'filtering' (Ratcliffe 1945). The 'garden suburb' provided an ideal template for such developments. There are many examples of such suburbs in those parts of the world receptive to British planning practice (Barnett 1986; Hall 1988). The peculiarities of local conditions and practices add interest to the general story of suburban planning and development, and the story told here is therefore just one of many that each make a small contribution to our knowledge of the ways in which Canadian suburban townscapes have evolved. It tells of a development in St. John's, the capital of the Dominion of Newfoundland. For its time, and in its place, it was an audacious undertaking which represented a coming together of the best of current town-planning thinking and practice in a place that many might consider a surprising venue for progressive planning ideas. Churchill Park, as the suburb came to be known, was intended to serve multiple objectives: to promote the clearing of the downtown slums, to advance the cause of social welfare and justice, to introduce modernity to the Avalon peninsula, to provide housing for returning veterans, to facilitate the orderly future expansion of the city and to restore the battered self-confidence of the people of the city. Surpris-ingly, most of these objectives were reached. The Context Context is all-important in the explanation of townscape. The absence of self-government in Newfoundland between 1934 and 1949 is one critical factor in the Churchill Park story. During these 15 years, the country was run by a Commission of Government appointed by, and answerable to, the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs in London (Hiller 1993). Three of the six commissioners and the governor were English, while the remaining three Commissioners were Newfoundlanders. Had Newfoundland enjoyed responsible government during the war years rather than a 'benign oligarchy' (Rowe 1980, 417), it is probable that Churchill Park would not have been built (Winter 1999). A second factor was the changing world view of Newfoundlanders during the early 1940s. The traditional attachment to Britain was replaced by a new attachment to the prosperous North America to which they were being introduced (Jackon 1986). …

‘On a business basis’: an American Garden City

Mariemont, Ohio, began as the project of a wealthy reform‐minded American woman who wanted to build a new town for the working people of her city of Cincinnati. Mary Emery, with the help of her business advisor Charles Livingood, hired planner John Nolen in 1921 to design the model town. Construction of this American Garden City began in 1925 using the Garden City idea introduced by Ebenezer Howard in 1898, and practised in England at Letchworth (1903) and Welwyn Garden City (1920). Mariemont represented the first fully articulated Garden City in the United States, as opposed to earlier attempts that had resulted in either suburban bedroom enclaves or worker housing strategies for a particular industry. Nolen used his Mariemont plan to demonstrate how a new town could be used to focus residential neighbourhoods for all classes around a town centre that was integrated within a regional metropolitan framework. Mariemont was offered as a solution to the problem of suburban alienation by providing decent housing, public amenities, and local industry within the metropolitan context.

The Hidden Roots of the Garden City Idea: From John Sinclair to John Claudius Loudon

The Garden City is known as a radical and influential invention presented by Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) in 1898 in his book To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. Less known is the past history of this conception of towns that combines the advantages of the city and the landscape. This article unfolds how firmly this notion was rooted in a tradition of enlightened thinking and planning. It is outlined by some of its most expressive milestones. Nowadays, almost-forgotten projects such as John Sinclair's “ideal village” and John Claudius Loudon's plan for London place the Garden City in a different and more complex light and indicate that Howard could count on an existing understanding of his concerns.

Denenchōfu: Building the Garden City in Japan

This article attempts to identify the fundamental physical and ideological elements that shape Japanese urbanism. It examines the development of the suburb of Denenchōfu near Tokyo as an example of Ebenezer Howard's garden city idea and shows how it met the needs of a new social order during the period of modernization. Denenchōfu was planned and developed outside of Tokyo at the beginning of the twentieth century by a group, led by Meiji period developer Eiichi Shibusawa, that was inspired by Howard's urban planning ideas. Like most garden cities. Denenchōfu was transformed over time into a relatively conventional suburb. Nevertheless it became one of the most successful planned developments in Japan. Part of this success stems from its timely completion, which coincided with the huge population exodus from Tokyo following the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 as well as from its prime location on the rapidly developing suburban railway network. Drawing from Japanese sources, this analysis traces the planning process of the project. It also examines the role of design guidelines and continuities with premodern forms in shaping the overall urban plan and individual houses.