Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern CommunityFor nearly a century the Garden City movement has represented one end of a continuum in an ongoing debate about the future of the modern city. In 1898 Ebenezer Howard envisioned an experimental community as the alternative to huge, teeming cities. Small, planned "garden cities" girdled by greenbelts were to serve in time as the "master key" to a higher, more cooperative stage of civilization based on ecologically balanced communities. Howard soon founded an international planning movement which ever since has represented a remarkable blend of accommodation to and protest against urban changes and the rise of the suburbs. In this interconnected history of the Garden City movement in the United States and Britain, Buder examines its influence, strengths and limitations. Howard's garden city, he shows, joined together two very different types of late-nineteenth-century experimental communities, creating a tension never fully resolved. One approach, utopian and radical in nature, challenged conventional values; the other, the model industrial towns of "enlightened" capitalists, reinforceed them. Buder traces this tension through planning history from the nineteenth-century world of visionaries, philanthropy, and self help into our own with its reliance on the expert, bureaucracy, and governmental policy, shedding light on the complex changes in the way we have thought in the twentieth century about community, urban design, and indeed the process of change. His final chapters examine the world-wide enthusiasm for "New Towns" between 1945-1975 and recent political and social trends which challenge many fundamental assumptions of modern planning. |
Contents
3 | |
2 Land Reform in an Urban Age | 14 |
3 Ebenezer Howard and Hard Times | 26 |
4 The American Cooperative Commonwealth | 38 |
Howard in the 1890s | 54 |
6 The Search for Environment | 64 |
7 The Building of a Garden City 18991920 | 77 |
8 The Garden City and Town Planning 19031918 | 96 |
9 Howard and Welwyn Garden City 19101940 | 116 |
10 The International Movement 19001940 | 133 |
11 The Garden City Movement in America 19001941 | 157 |
12 British New Towns 19451980 | 181 |
13 The Future of the Garden City | 199 |
Notes | 217 |
Bibliographical Essay | 249 |
251 | |
Other editions - View all
Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community Stanley Buder Limited preview - 1990 |
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Alfred Marshall Alfred Russel Wallace American approach architects architecture areas attracted Britain British Brotherhood Bruce Wallace building century Chicago Cities and Town city planning civic communitarian concern Cora Richmond critical Culpin Ebenezer Howard economic effort environment environmental experiment Fabian Fabian Society Federation Garden City Association Garden City concept Garden City movement garden-city growth Henry George home colony ideal ideas important influence interest Journal labor land layout Letchworth Lewis Mumford London low-density ment middle-class Milton Keynes modern Mumford municipal neighborhood Neville new-town organization Osborn Owen Owen's political population postwar problems professional promote Purdom Radburn radical Raymond Unwin reform regarded Regional Planning Reith Report Report residential residents Robert Owen schemes social socialist society Spiritualism suburban suburbs Thomas Adams thought tion To-morrow Topolobampo Town Planning Town Planning Association Town program urban utopian vision Wallace's Welwyn Garden City York
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