ancient cities

286 Garden City
Americans. Gans showed both the fears and aspirations
of these newly arrived suburbanites and argued
for the need to understand the residents as individuals
struggling to achieve the American Dream.
Gans’s criticism of the term underclass in his
book, The War against the Poor (1995), highlights
his propensity to take on hotly contested subjects,
often changing the trajectory of the debate. The
term underclass was commonly used by both journalists
and social scientists in an effort to highlight
a social group seemingly isolated geographically
and apparently outside the bounds of normative
American conduct. But Gans argued that, in the
tradition of the controversial report by Daniel
Patrick Moynihan in 1965, “The Negro Family:
The Case for National Action,” the term perpetuated
an essentialist understanding of the ghetto
poor as culturally deficient and undeserving of aid.
In dialogue with William Julius Wilson, author of
The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the
Underclass, and Public Policy, he abandoned the
term underclass. They proposed that through ethnographic
work, the overly simplistic and often
derogatory understanding of the poor as an underclass
should be challenged by portraying the complexity
and diversity of the ghetto poor and the
context in which they are embedded.
See also Ethnic Enclave; Gentrification; Ghetto;
Neighborhood Revitalization; Suburbanization
Further Readings
Eva Rosen
Gans, Herbert. 1962. Urban Villagers: Group and Class
in the Life of Italian-Americans. New York: The Free
Press.
———. 1967. The Levittowners: Ways of Life and
Politics in a New Suburban Community. New York:
Pantheon Books.
———. 1988. Middle American Individualism: The Future
of Liberal Democracy. New York: The Free Press.
———. 1996. The War against the Poor: The Underclass
and Anti-poverty Policy. New York: Basic Books.
Whyte, William Foote. 1943. Street Corner Society: The
Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Wilson, William J. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The
Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wirth, Louis. 1928. The Ghetto. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Ga r d e n Ci t y
The Garden City is a planning concept and model
developed by Ebenezer Howard, who founded the
Garden City Association in 1899. Howard’s writing
strongly influenced an early generation of
urban planners, as well as the City Beautiful
movement in the United States. Two garden cities
were built in England in the early 1900s, and
urban planners and architects in Europe and
South America followed with garden cities in their
countries. In the United States, garden cities were
promoted by the Regional Planning Association,
resulting in the construction of three communities
in the 1930s. The Garden City has served as a
model for urban development and an inspiration
for other planning models to the present day.
History
In 1899, Ebenezer Howard founded the Garden
City Association, a group formed to promote his
ideas for planned communities, which would be
include balanced areas of residential, industrial,
and commercial spaces, surrounded by greenbelt
and agricultural areas, to produce a healthy living
environment—smokeless, slumless communities—
for the urban dweller. Howard was influenced by
his reading of Edward Bellamy’s socialist utopian
novels, Looking Backward (1888) and Equality
(1897), although elements of the Garden City
could be found in earlier planning efforts (Benjamin
Ward Richardson, for example, published Hygeia:
A City of Health, his plan for a model city to alleviate
the unhealthy conditions of the industrial
city, in 1876). Howard’s plan for the Garden City
was first published in 1899 as Tomorrow: A
Peaceful Path to Real Reform, but the book did
not generate much attention; a revised version
titled Garden Cities of Tomorrow, published in
1904, became a cornerstone in urban planning.
The Garden City was designed to house some
32,000 people on a site of 6,000 acres. Six radial
boulevards 120 feet wide extended from the center,