Garden Suburb Research Articles

The Colonel Light Gardens Garden Suburb Commission: building a planned community

Colonel Light Gardens, about 6 km south of Adelaide, South Australia, is recognized as a national and international exemplar in the field of garden suburb planning. The first objective of the suburb's Development Plan seeks the conservation and reinforcement of its ‘original three dimensional garden suburb design’ and statements supporting other objectives detail its ‘essential’ urban design and land use elements. However, town planning is more than the design of urban places and spaces. It is also concerned with how these may be achieved effectively and how the services and facilities required by citizens are properly supplied and located. This crucial other side of the ‘town planning coin’ has been demonstrated in the Colonel Light Gardens' development. The Garden Suburb Act of 1919 established a Garden Suburb Commission with powers similar to what, in later years, would be known as urban development corporations. Hence, it was first in a line of such organizations in South Australia and stands with international exemplars such as the British garden cities and new towns.

Charles H. Cheney of California

In the 1910s, Charles Henry Cheney appeared as a dynamo in a new planning movement in California. He established the first state-wide conference on city planning, persuaded the legislature to pass the first city planning enabling act and encouraged cities to create a planning commission to prepare a master plan. Although most of the newly established planning commissions began to prepare a zoning ordinance, Cheney assisted their efforts because he perceived zoning as a primary element of a master plan. He drafted the first California city zoning enabling act to give unchartered cities the authority for establishing single-family residence districts, and prepared a number of zoning ordinances in the West Coast. However, in the 1920s, facing over-emphasis on the economic and social aspects of city planning, he became a guardian of beauty and drafted protective covenants including an art jury and architectural control for newly developed picturesque garden suburbs. Cheneymoved to Palos Verdes, one of those garden suburbs in Southern California, and devoted his life to its city building process until his death. This paper provides an overview of Cheney's planning practices and thoughts.

A benevolent tyrant? the principles and practices of Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936), social reformer and founder of Hampstead garden suburb

This article focuses on the formation and application of the principles of Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936). Despite her lifelong and innovative commitment to social and housing reform, she has received only perfunctory recognition in women's history. The aims here are twofold. First, this oversight will be redressed by foregrounding the subtle, shrewd and imaginative means of persuasion Barnett used in the pursuit of her ideals. Second, her principles and practices will be included in a wider debate concerning the means by which middle-class women subverted dominant discourses without apparently transgressing boundaries of decency. Throughout, the intention is to problematise the widely held assumptions of her intransigence and insensitivity, which appear to have confined her to the footnotes of history.

A benevolent tyrant? the principles and practices of Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936), social reformer and founder of Hampstead garden suburb

Abstract This article focuses on the formation and application of the principles of Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936). Despite her lifelong and innovative commitment to social and housing reform, she has received only perfunctory recognition in women's history. The aims here are twofold. First, this oversight will be redressed by foregrounding the subtle, shrewd and imaginative means of persuasion Barnett used in the pursuit of her ideals. Second, her principles and practices will be included in a wider debate concerning the means by which middle-class women subverted dominant discourses without apparently transgressing boundaries of decency. Throughout, the intention is to problematise the widely held assumptions of her intransigence and insensitivity, which appear to have confined her to the footnotes of history.

Garden Cities and Suburbs: At Home and Abroad

Garden cities and garden suburbs were a dominant theme in community planning throughout the twentieth century. Ebenezer Howard’s garden city at Letchworth and Henrietta Barnett’s garden suburb at Hampstead, London, attracted international renown and emulation, beginning before 1914. The design standards proved adaptable to private development, model industrial villages, public housing, and state new towns. Today, the ideas of Howard, Raymond Unwin, and John Nolen are providing the basis for sustainable development and the New Urbanism movement. This review seeks to draw out the continuum between Howard’s garden city model and changing urban paradigms of the twentieth century.

From Garden Suburb to Olde City Ward

In post-Independence India, new colonies of garden suburbs served an educated citizenry to integrate science and nature into their daily life. However, one such colony of bungalows ( kothi) and gardens, begun in Jaipur in the 1950s, after two generations of incremental construction, has become in the 1990s similar to an old city ward with towering courtyard houses ( haveli) abutting the property lines. This longitudinal study compares the middle class occupants’ initial aspirations with real outcomes as documented in the materiality of built form. The biography of these buildings reflects not only a quest for a life style of class, but the adapting of site and building to make secure one’s livelihood and heritage for one’s descendants, and to manage relations with one’s neighbors. The built environment is not simply an outcome of regulation, design, and willful intent. The levels of agency and the variety of actors are multiple and complex, demanding an analysis of social interaction and an assessment of aggregate outcomes.

Lawn and order: aesthetics and architecture in Australian suburbia

Aside from its simple strength as a great story, George Johnston's novel My Brother Jack (1964) continues to impress for its evocation of life in Australia during the inter-war years. Few other works of fiction, or non-fiction for that matter, can match the force and economy of its use of some of the more culturally telling manners, mores and material culture of daily life in the period. Johnston's cultural acuity is typically sharp in his use of the developing suburban passion for lawn in the 1930s. Lawn acts as the catalyst for the protagonist's rising disaffection for the garden suburb of Beverley Park Gardens Estate. Within a few months of moving in, David Meredith finds himself clawing at the ‘granulated plaster walls’ of the late 1930s' red brick bungalow that he and his new wife have built.

The Decline of Churchill's 'Garden Suburb' and Rise of his Private Office: the Prime Minister's Department, 1940--45

The Decline of Churchill's 'Garden Suburb' and Rise of his Private Office: the Prime Minister's Department, 1940--45

Landscape Architect Van der Swaelmen and City Planning Based on the Garden Suburb in Belgium

第一次世界大戦後のベルギーにおいて, 造園家のヴァン・デル・スワールメンは当時の多くの郊外住宅地建設で採用された田園郊外の計画に重要な役割を果たした。本研究では, 彼が計画に関与した田園郊外と4編の著述を取り上げて分析することにより, 当時の都市整備における田園郊外の位置付けを明らかにすることを目的とする。その結果, ヴァン・デル・スワールメンは, 田園郊外を都市および地方計画の重要な構成要素として位置づけていたこと, 建築デザイン, 街区構成, 都市および地方計画をベルギーでは初めて段階的に序列だてて全体を構想していたことが明らかになった。

The suburban aspiration in England since 1919

In contrast to the pervasive anti‐suburbanism of English intellectual culture, this article suggests that the suburbs have made a generally favourable contribution to English society since 1919. This is because suburban living has been pursued and enjoyed by millions of people from different class and ethnic groups. The article also demonstrates that the attractions of the suburbs stemmed in no small part from the influence of garden city and garden suburb experiments in early twentieth century England.

Morphological periods, planning and reality: the case of England's inter-war suburbs

The physical forms of England's inter-war suburbs are examined, concentrating on those created by private enterprise. Attention is given to the contrasts between inter-war suburbs and those created before the First World War, and the timing of the adoption of architectural styles and other aspects of built form characteristic of the inter-war period is considered. In places, houses in Edwardian styles continued to be built well into the inter-war period. The dominant characteristic of the period was the creation of garden suburbs. The Tudor Walters Report was more an endorsement of such suburbs than a stimulus to them and many of its recommendations were not adhered to.

Kathleen M. Slack, Henrietta's Dream: A Chronicle of the Hampstead Garden Suburb – Varieties and Virtues. London: Hampstead Garden Suburb Archive Trust, 1997. 157pp. No price stated.

Kathleen M. Slack, <i>Henrietta's Dream: A Chronicle of the Hampstead Garden Suburb – Varieties and Virtues</i>. London: Hampstead Garden Suburb Archive Trust, 1997. 157pp. No price stated.

Intention of Garden Suburb Planning in Belgium for Several Years after the First World War

第一次世界大戦後, ベルギーではイギリス等の影響のもと, 数多くの田園郊外が建設された。本研究では, 田園郊外の建設を積極的に進めたベルギー地方自治体連合が1920年に主催した低廉住宅全国会議と, 1925年に発表した「田園都市に関する特別基準法」案の分析を行い, ベルギーにおける田園郊外建設の経緯とその理念を明らかにすることを目的とする。その結果, 第一次世界大戦後すぐの時期には戦災復興のため, 土地所有の制限や協同組合方式が社会秩序維持に有効で経済的である面から注目されたこと, 復興後は快適な住宅地が求められるようになり, 低層低密の構成の手法の普及が計られるようになったことが明らかになった。

‘Order out of chaos’: the London Society and the planning of London 1912–1920

The history of civic consciousness in the late nineteenth century has focused on philanthropic housing reform and the provision of civic amenities such as public parks and libraries. Histories of the growth of the town planning movement in the same period likewise have been dominated by housing, with an emphasis on the garden suburb and the activities of the Garden City Association (founded 1899). At the same time, and partly due to the popularity of research on Ruskin, Morris and their followers, the history of popular movements emerging at the end of the last century has concentrated on conservation groups like the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (founded 1877) and the National Trust (founded 1895). An analysis is presented here of an emerging voluntary civic and planning movement and its contribution to urban and planning history. It examines the growth of modern civic consciousness from 1890 to 1920, when citizens began to exercise their right to participate in the planning and design of the urban environment. The analysis focuses on the relationship between the town planning movement, local government and a voluntary planning and amenity group, the London Society, founded in 1912, to argue that civic consciousness shifted in the period from a nineteenth century philanthropic approach to urban reform, which centred on housing and amenity, to a more professional and democratic attempt to attend to the planning of the whole urban environment. The research identifies a moment of progressive optimism regarding urban civilization at the beginning of this century, and thus dispels the myth that the period was characterized by anti-urbanism.

Abadan: planning and architecture under the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company

Industry and urbanization were brought to south-west Iran when large quantities of oil were struck there in the early years of this century. This paper explores the development of Abadan from these beginnings to the 1950s, and particularly the housing and planning forms adopted by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and its architect James M. Wilson. Abadan was in effect a colonial company town whose early development combined spacious bungalow compounds for British expatriate workers, barracklike lines of huts for labour recruited locally and from India, and a rapidly overcrowded ‘native town’ under local municipal control. The Company used Wilson’s expertise in an attempt to answer the physical problems created by the growth of Abadan between the wars and to deflect pressure exerted both by Iranian nationalists and the British government. In the garden suburb of Bawarda he created a model solution that used planning and housing form to represent ethnic and social harmony under the discreet paternal benevolence of the Company. This, however, was inappropriate to Abadan’s problems and quickly eclipsed by the political events that led to the Company’s expulsion in 1951.

Planning and building the corporate suburb of Mount Royal, 1910-1925

New models of urban planning, including the lofty design principles of City Beautiful architects and the comprehensive schemes of Garden City and Garden Suburb reformers, were introduced to Canada during the first decades of the twentieth century. Despite their widespread advocacy by professionals and civic-minded enthusiasts alike, the impact of these new models on the contemporary Canadian city was actually quite limited. However, selected principles of these models were used rather pragmatically in several locations, including the northwestern suburbs of Montreal where the Canadian Northern Railway built the 'Model City' of Mount Royal, a corporate suburb that was planned, designed, and developed as a real estate venture to help offset the costs of building a railway tunnel into the centre of Montreal. This paper examines the process of city-building in Mount Royal during the town's formative years, from 1910 to 1925. It demonstrates how the idea for the town emerged as a speculative residential scheme at the height of the pre-First World War land boom; how the City Beautiful ideals of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr and the Garden Suburb principles of Henry Vivian were introduced to Montreal during their visits there in 1910; and how, one year later, their ideas and other planning models converged and were incorporated to form the unique design for Mount Royal's urban plan by Frederick Todd, a protege of the junior Olmsted and Canada's most prominent landscape architect of the early twentieth century.'

ハムステッド・ガーデン・サバーブのクアドラングルについて : イギリスの田園郊外とその住宅に関する研究(II)

Here is analyzed the syntactic relations between urban and housing designs in the English garden suburbs, which is epitomized in Hampstead Garden Suburb planned by R. Unwin from 1906. Unwin's early interest in college quadrangle and village green is developed into the geometrically enclosed green under the influences of Georgian town planning and C. Sitte. The model designs of cul-de-sac road and quadrangle illustrated in Unwin's book, Town Planning in Practice,1909, are compared to the executed designs in Hampstead Garden Suburb, such as the Orchard by Parker & Unwin, Waterlow Court by M.H. Baillie Scott, Litchfield Square by Parker & Unwin, and Lucas Square by G. Lucas, to reveal that each architect emphasizes the axis of the cul-de-sac road by a terminal element and secures the symmetry of elevations surrounding the green, although in a different style respectively.

Co‐partnership housing and the garden city movement

Tenant co‐partnership was a social movement which developed alongside the garden city movement in Britain during the period 1900 to 1914, and which financed and built most of the garden suburbs and villages associated with that movement. It was also a unique form of tenure, combining features of a tenant co‐operative and a limited dividend company. This article argues that forms of housing tenure have important long‐term consequences for the built environment, and that co‐partnership was an attempt to find a form which expressed Howard's holistic vision. In particular, co‐partnership was an attempt to harmonize the interests of the individual and the community, and of landlord and tenant. That it did not succeed is due to the failure of the co‐operative movement to back it, then to the effects of the First World War, the predominance of council housing and the inner tensions which led to the deformation of co‐partnership. The article ends with some insights gained from those estates which are still, after...

The extension of Ebenezer Howard's ideas on urbanization outside the British Isles: The example of Palestine

The idea of the Garden City, which was initiated by Ebenezer Howard at the end of the last century in England, was extended quickly to other places in the world. While the establishment of Garden Cities encountered many difficulties, there was much success in the establishment of Garden Suburbs. In Palestine, where Jewish immigrants and Zionist leaders brought Ebenezer Howard's ideas from Europe, Garden Suburbs were very successful. Zionism looked upon the Garden Suburb as the model for urban Zionist colonization in Palestine and it intended to establish such suburbs near all the big cities. Only Jews were supposed to live in those suburbs. The first Garden Suburb was Tel-Aviv near the port town of Jaffa. Subsequently, Tel-Aviv became the first Jewish city in Palestine. Following Tel-Aviv Jewish suburbs were established near Jerusalem, Haifa and Tiberias. In Palestine too, as in Europe, there were plans to establish Jewish Garden Cities, but they did not turn out well.

ハムステッド・ガーデン・サバーブのバタフライ型住棟について : イギリスの田園郊外とその住宅に関する研究(I)

ハムステッド・ガーデン・サバーブのバタフライ型住棟について : イギリスの田園郊外とその住宅に関する研究(I)