'Looking Backward': The Garden City one Hundred Years on

Abstract

We are told that one hundred years ago Howard laid down his proposals for a project that was probably the most all-embracing and ambitious one yet for a civic community in an industrial society. This decidedly experimental work in manual form subsumed that concern which for a century had convulsed the structures of industrialisation and an emergent consumer society flowering within an age old agrarian world picture. This manual covered social economy, ground rents, the integrated and self-governing community, things local and national, progress, equality, brought together models for city and territorial planning with architecture for the citizen to the end of forging working links as between social questions, developing production, the agricultural question and urban growth. Howard 's aim in all this is here seen to have been to shape those complex processes of change that were then transforming the industrial set up as it hit a moment of inflexion in its progress. This great scheme for the city is here held to have been swamped by the push and demands of Ford inspired industrial expansion and set aside by advances in modern City and Territorial Planning thought for which the garden city was but a trivial model for urban growth. For the author, with the Ford model now ebbing, with many of its basic tenets in question, it would seem to be as good a moment as any to reconsider a project which, for him, should never have been reneged upon.