What Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities Got Wrong
In essay 3 of the series, I look at what new town developers can learn from England's unfinished experiment in citybuilding.
Garden Cities were the brainchild of Ebenezer Howard, as articulated through his book Garden Cities of To-Morrow.
It’s an unusual book with an unusual history. The odd hyphenation in the title might have been used to draw attention to the futuristic vision Howard sought to present, seeking to underscore the forward-looking nature of his urban planning concepts.
Or, perhaps Howard was overcompensating, as when he wrote it he was a stenographer with no development, design, planning, or political experience.
In either case, the surprisingly well-written book was widely praised and triggered interest in his ideas. It was a commercial and ideological success, coupled with mixed results.
Its followers include British architects Raymond Unwind and Barry Parker, who developed Letchworth Garden City, and planner/writer Frederick Osborn, who developed Welwyn Garden City, all following Howard’s technical principles. Clarence Stein and Henry Wright brought the idea stateside with Radburn, New Jersey. The idea continued with the New Towns Movement, Green Cities, and, ultimately, with today’s torchbearer, New Urbanism.
Garden Cities offer the same paradox that originally pissed me off about New Urbanism. None of these ideas are “new” in any way.
Humans had been building human-scaled, walkable, mixed-use villages for, well, all of humanity. In fairness, in light of transformative and traumatic changes caused by rapid industrialization and modernist planning, the core values of human-scaled development are absolutely worth repeating. In this sense, Garden Cities of Tomorrow are little different than the Charter of the New Urbanism published 100 years later. Sure, it’s been said before, but it needs to be said.
Garden Cities are based upon duplicating old towns, old neighborhoods, and humanity through a mix of uses, frugality with land, access to green space and jobs, with civic structures taking prominent spaces in the land plan. Again - nothing new. The new part was master planning these cities in advance, including locking up the land, raising the capital, developing utilities, and recruiting residents. A good chunk of Howard’s book focuses on the finance, taxation, and management of these master-planned visions, which makes for an interesting read, even if much of his structure never came to fruition.
While many new towns and developments took ideas from Garden Cities, only a few were built, and even those only partially. Letchworth and Welwyn, both about 20 miles north of London, are the most famous.
Ebenezer Howard's ideas on Garden Cities have long been lauded as visionary, progressive, and beneficial for urban planning. However, a closer read reveals these ideas are impractical and even detrimental in several ways. While Howard's intentions may have been noble, his execution and understanding of urban dynamicism were severely lacking.
Here are six ways Ebenezer Howard missed the mark:
1 Idealism Over Practicality
At the heart of Howard's garden city concept is an idealistic vision of self-contained communities surrounded by green belts, combining the benefits of both urban and rural living (the Three Magnets, above). This utopian dream, however, overlooks the complexities and practicalities of real-world urban development. Howard envisioned these Garden Cities as small, tightly controlled environments with limited populations. Still, such an approach fails to accommodate the inevitable growth and expansion that come with successful urban areas. The same problem exists in America today, predominantly in blue cities and states, where developments are built to inelastic climax condition, and growth is restricted or prohibited.
2 Economic Shortcomings
Howard's model assumes that economic activities and employment opportunities can be evenly distributed within these small Garden Cities. In reality, economies of scale and the natural clustering of industries make this unfeasible. His vision did not account for the economic forces driving people to larger cities for better job prospects, diverse services, and greater cultural opportunities. As a result, Garden Cities risk becoming economically stagnant and unable to attract and retain a dynamic workforce. There remains some debate on unipolar versus multipolar metros. Still, Howard’s drawings implied retail storefronts throughout the city, which discounted the network effect of Main Street-ing commercial activity, which is what ultimately happened.
3 Social Isolation
One of the most significant criticisms of Howard's Garden Cities is the potential for social isolation. This thesis plays out in the modern world as suburbia is directly linked to what is now referred to as a “loneliness epidemic”. By design, Garden Cities were intended to be self-sufficient and separate from larger urban areas. This separation led to insularity, which in a pre-internet world reduced exposure to diverse ideas common to London. Most of the Garden Cities north of London are accessible to London via a 1-hour or less train ride. And despite each having a commercial core that few American suburbs have, they still feel small and isolating.
4 Environmental Concerns / Car Dependency
Blaming Ebenezer Howard for failing to plan for the car is like blaming Thomas Jefferson for not making Monticello ADA-compliant.
Ironically, while Howard's Garden Cities were designed to incorporate green spaces and promote environmental sustainability, in reality, they were primarily early-stage proto-typical examples of urban sprawl. The spread of low-density development increased reliance on automobiles, contributing to higher greenhouse gas emissions and greater land consumption. Of course, when Garden Cities of To-Morrow was written in 1899, much of this would have been impossible to see. Blaming Ebenezer Howard for failing to plan for the car is like blaming Thomas Jefferson for not making Monticello ADA-compliant. Still, the long-term effects of car dependency are real and an ever-present lesson in these towns. For the most part, The Garden Cities development pattern is contrary to the principles of sustainable urbanism, which advocate for higher density and efficient public transportation networks.
5 Planning and Governance
Howard's concept heavily emphasized centralized planning and control, often at the expense of organic growth and local autonomy, which was also an early-stage example of the progressive planning dogma that dominated the 20th century to ruinous effect. This top-down approach led to inefficiencies and a lack of responsiveness to residents' needs. Howard suffered from what today might be called “Sim City Disease,” the belief that cities can be easily orchestrated by a central maker, with a passive populace and no consequence, and, like current planning, sometimes comes off as sanctimonious: "The whole scheme here advocated... offers a solution to one of the most pressing problems of our time: the accommodation of the people."
The assumption is that Howard knows how to develop a city and that he had done this before, which, of course, he had not. Bold assertions require bold experience and bold experimentations. In retrospect, a better read would be a post-mortem on the semi-failed experience of attempting to build a garden city.
Lastly, the original Garden Cities' aesthetic uniformity mirrors today’s HOAs, with their emphasis on tidy, green surroundings and orderly layouts. This can and does result in a bland and uninspiring environment (though Garden Cities are substantially more diverse than typical monolithic American suburbs).
Great cities thrive on diversity in their populations and physical forms. The cultural and architectural homogeneity promoted by the garden city model fails to capture successful urban centers' vibrant, chaotic, and ever-evolving nature. Comparatively speaking, London feels infinitely more alive. One hundred twenty years on, the original Garden Cities still feel slightly inorganic, mostly due to their heavy-handed master planning.
Summary
While Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities might appear attractive in theory, their real-world implementation reveals these fatal flaws. In his brief stint as developer near the end of his life, Howard ran into the same problem traditional neighborhood developers do today—it’s hard to execute.
Anyone can come up with an idea, but an idea is worthless without the ability to turn it into reality. Talk is cheap.
These shortcomings, from economic impracticality and social isolation to environmental concerns and rigid planning, highlight the fundamental problems with Howard's vision. Modern urban planning must move beyond such dated and idealistic models to embrace the complexity and dynamism of contemporary urban life, fostering economically vibrant, socially inclusive, environmentally sustainable cities.
Howard may have started a movement, but much work remains.