Garden city movement
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The garden city movement is an approach to urban planning that was founded in 1898 by Ebenezer Howard in England. Garden cities were to be planned, self-contained communities surrounded by greenbelts, and containing carefully balanced areas of residences, industry, and agriculture.
Inspired by the Utopian novel Looking Backward, Howard published To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1898 (reissued in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow), organized the Garden City Association in 1899, and founded two cities in England: Letchworth Garden City in 1903, and Welwyn Garden City in 1920. (Letchworth is commonly referred to as such, and Welwyn called by its full name.) Both designs are durable successes and healthy communities today, although not a full realization of Howard's ideals.
The idea of the garden city was influential in the United States (in Sunnyside, Queens; Radburn, New Jersey; Jackson Heights, Queens; the Woodbourne neighborhood of Boston; Garden City, New York; and Baldwin Hills Village in Los Angeles) and in Canada in (Walkerville, Ontario). The first German garden city, Hellerau, a suburb of Dresden, was founded in 1909. The concept was drawn upon for German worker housing built during the Weimar years, and again in England after World War II when the New Towns Act triggered the development of many new communities based on Howard's egalitarian vision. The garden city movement also influenced the British urbanist Sir Patrick Geddes in the planning of Tel-Aviv, Israel. Contemporary town planning charters like New Urbanism and Principles of Intelligent Urbanism find their origins in this movement.
