ancient cities

288 Garden City
Association (in 1941 the name would be changed
once again, to the Town and Country Planning
Association). By this time, there was a worldwide
Garden Cities movement, as Howard’s ideas served
as a model for urban development in other countries.
In 1908, the Australian government selected
the site for a new national capital (present-day
Canberra) and commissioned an international
competition to design the new city. The winning
design, by two Chicago architects, is derived in part
from the comprehensive regional mapping for central
city and surrounding garden cities published in
Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. New
Delhi, in northern India, was similarly designed (in
the 1910s) as the new capital city for the British
colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent, and the
broad axial boulevards and clustering of functional
areas within the city (built in the 1920s) are derived
from Howard’s Garden City model.
In the United States, the Regional Planning
Association of America (RPAA), a group of architects,
planners, and economists, including Lewis
Mumford, was formed in 1923. Influenced by
Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard, and the British
Garden City, the RPAA lobbied for regional planning
to replace the haphazard growth of urban
centers in the United States. Inspired by the success
of the British garden cities, two members of the
group (the architects Henry Wright and Clarence
Stone) designed two new suburban communities,
Sunnyside (in Queens) and Radburn (in New
Jersey). During the Depression, the Roosevelt
administration planned for the development of 19
suburban garden cities as part of New Deal legislation
and Work Progress Administration (construction
of the new homes would provide jobs for
unemployed workers). But Congress provided funding
for just nine of the greenbelt towns, and only
three were actually built (Greendale in Milwaukee,
Green Hills in Cincinnati, and Greenbelt in
Maryland). From the beginning the towns were
attacked by the real estate and builders lobbies as
socialistic enterprises, and Congress later required
the government to sell the housing.
Postwar New Towns
In post–World War II Great Britain, with London
and other cities suffering extensive damage from
aerial bombing, Peter Abercrombie’s Greater
London Plan of 1944 proposed the relocation of up
to 500,000 people in of 8 to 10 satellite towns separated
from London by greenbelts. In 1946, Parliament
passed the New Towns Act, authorizing the construction
of 20 new towns across Great Britain,
including eight in the greater London area and five
in Scotland. In the 1960s, a second group of new
towns was authorized to further control urban
expansion of Greater London, and the last (and largest
at more than 200,000 residents), Milton Keynes,
was begun in 1967. In the United States as well, the
legacy of the Garden City influenced later urban
development in the form of new towns built in
Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland (both in
the Washington, D.C., area). In France, nine villes
nouvelles were built in the 1960s to control the
expansion of older urban centers, and other European
countries have followed this model in later decades.
A Continuing Legacy
Howard’s plan for the Garden City was influential
among urban planners in the first decades of the
twentieth century, influencing the design not just
of new garden cities but of new national capitals
as well. Howard was president of International
Garden City Association, which later became
the International Housing and Town Planning
Federation. Although the Garden City was opposed
by powerful business interests in the United States
(which effectively halted the Roosevelt administration’s
plan for more extensive development of the
cooperative communities), the planning model was
influential in the design of new towns in both the
pre- and postwar period. In recent decades, the
continuing legacy of the Garden City movement
can be seen in urban planning around the world,
most directly in the new urbanism and sustainable
development initiatives that have become part of
urban development in almost every country.
Ray Hutchison
See also City Beautiful Movement; City Planning; Ideal
City; New Urbanism; Sustainable Development; Urban
Planning
Further Readings
Beevers, Robert. 1988. The Garden City Utopia: A
Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard. New York:
Macmillan.