Garden city

Garden city

Chief characteristics:

With the Industrial Revolution depressing ugliness, haphazard growth, congestion and unhealthful conditions had gripped the old towns when Sir Ebenezer Howard set forth his ideas in a book published in 1898 entitled ‘Tomorrow’.

His idea was Garden city.

A garden city is a town designed for healthy living and industry; of a size that makes it possible a full measure of social life; surrounded by a rural belt; the whole of the land being in public ownership.

The purpose of Howard's plan is to sustain "a healthy, natural, and economic combination of town and country life" through a balance of work and leisure. In this goal, Howard reflects the ideal in American public life to establish a harmonious relationship between the machine and garden.

Technology, hardly a foe to civilization in Howard's view, is essential to healthy public life: "The smoke fiend is kept well within bounds in Garden City; for all machinery is driven by electric energy". Industry and agriculture coexist in his ideal community - as do city and countryside, utopia and arcadia. Howard's sense of balance - in this case, the concentric circles of the Garden City intersected by broad boulevards - assumes that ideal forms will shape and perfect human functions:.

Commerce in Garden City follows the example of World's Fairs and exhibition. In this shopping space - dividing central park from 'excellently built houses' - we discover heterotopia: a physical locale set apart from traditional public life where rules and expectations are suspended.

Here, one may depart the outside world and its unpredictable weather to enjoy the artificial joys of shopping and even a Winter Garden. In this heterotopia, citizens may play in commercial worlds of fantasy and experience the transitional space between contradictory notions of the sculpted wilderness and the garden home. Unlike utopia, this heterotopian space of commerce is physical. It is not a vision of reformers; it is a project of planners.

Individualism in Garden city is neatly balanced by the needs and common-sense requirements of the community. Howard emphasizes that municipal authorities control little about housing except their observance of "harmonious departure" from the street line. Beyond the urban core, individuals or groups may construct charitable or philanthropic institutions without government interference.

In the greenbelt, farmers and co-operatives may try any system to tend their livestock or grow their crops as they deem useful. As Howard puts it: "This plan, or if the reader be pleased to so term it, this absence of plan, avoids the dangers of stagnation or dead level, and through encouraging individual initiative, permits of the fullest co-operation".

Like so many other social planners, Ebenezer Howard's Garden City attempts to balance the forces of control and freedom, machine and garden, through the construction of the village. However we will see in the postwar public life that the increasing encroachment of the nation state on individual affairs renders his vision more and more difficult to attain.

 As an example of Garden City:-

Letchworth

Letchworth was designed for a maximum population of 3500 in an area of 1000 acres.

Dwellings for all classes of people were distributed about a central courtyard in which public buildings would be located.

Self sufficiency by starting industrial units.

Industries located on outskirts. Absence of overdeveloped center and underdeveloped periphery.

Town to be surrounded by a permanent agricultural belt of 5000 acres.

Advantages of both rural life such as fresh air, gardens, playfields etc and urban amenities like schools, theatres, hospitals and recreation.

Zoning in Letchworth determined the landuse of a specific area and the whole land was under public ownership so no intermingling of landuse due to speculation.

The agricultural strip on the periphery checks the expansion of the urban area i.e. the sprawl.

Open spaces remain for development.

Neighbourhood Unit:

Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City concept had a profound influence on urban planning. Many plans have attempted to directly emulate Howard’s original ideas, while others have been revised over the past one hundred years. Two major modifications of Howard’s ideas, Perry’s “Neighbourhood Unit” design and Stein and Wright’s plans for “New Towns,” involve the modification of Howard’s ideas regarding the design of residential areas so as to accommodate the growing influence of the automobile.

Together, the Garden City concept, the notion of the Neighbourhood Unit, and the “New Town” idea, influence urban planning to this day.  The integration of town and country, the separation of conflicting land uses and modes of travel, and the ideas of growth management are all elements of the Garden City concept that have made their way into plans of most major Western cities.

Planners in the United States         during the 1920’s had a great interest in the Garden City idea of residential neighbourhoods replete with local services such as schools, parks, and churches.  However, by this time planners were also seeking means to address the traffic and safety issues that coincided with increasing automobile traffic.  A widely accepted solution came in the form of a modification to the residential layout found in Howard’s concept, proposed by Clarence Perry in 1929.

Perry’s proposal for “the neighbourhood unit” involved an attempt to develop school-oriented, traffic-insulated areas. As with Howard’s Garden City, the neighbourhood unit represented an attempt to build a strong sense of community .Perry’s concept had several unique elements. First, residential neighbourhoods were to be organized into units of about 64 hectares, and each would hold a population large enough to support one elementary school.  No child would be required to walk farther than 500 metres to their school, which was to be, located at the centre of the neighbourhood along with a community centre, a library, and other community services.

Radburn Idea.

          Neighborhood Layout with large “superblocks” designed to separate automobiles from pedestrians.

                    A second innovation of the neighbourhood unit was its new approach to road design.  In this case, the grid pattern of streets was abandoned in favour of a hierarchy of roadways.  Main streets containing shops and apartments would run along the perimeter of each neighbourhood, while roads within the neighbourhood would be designed so as to discourage through traffic.

As the automobile was making its presence known and becoming more affordable, developments were becoming increasingly freed from the need to be centered on transit. The result was the emergence of sprawling suburbs.

 In 1929, as a way to combat sprawl, Clarence Perry began to promote the concept of the ‘neighbourhood unit.’ Consisting of a population no greater than that which could serve an elementary school, the neighbourhood unit was no greater than 64 hectares and centered on a community centre, consisting of a library, elementary school, and other community services. Thus, the community centre began to replace transit and garden space as the central focal point.

Clarence Stein and Henry Wright used this concept when they developed the planned community of Radburn, New Jersey, except with a dendritic street system that attempted to separate automobile and pedestrian spaces.

After its initial success, Gruen received several other commissions, including a commission by the Dayton Company to build a shopping mall outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The final wave of sub-urbanization, however, came with the end of the Second World War. Spurned by government programs aimed at enabling war veterans the ability to finance a home, growing racial tensions, the creation of the Eisenhower interstate system, a revived construction industry, advances in telecommunications (making key locations less important), and a reduction in automobile costs, the result created the conditions we know today, which are only magnifications of the sprawl immediately following the end of the Second World War.

Linear City

Linear urbanization can be divided in two interfering and inseparable components: as spatial concept and as socio-economic concept. Mode and extend of urbanization is for an important part the spatial translation of socio-economic processes and organization of production. The organization of production and the organization of our society are at present subject to important changes.

A paradigm-shift from fordist production to post-industrial production, as part of a larger paradigm-shift from modern to post- or even post-postmodern society can be recognized. From the end of the nineteenth century idea's rise about linear organization of housing, working and recreation, as well for new cities as for the expansion and linking of existing ones.

 The main assumptions at the basis of these ideas where; efficiency (of production and transportation), hygiene (air and space), accessibility of services, recreation and work and the combination of urban and rural advantages. Next to these assumptions, also the affection with technology, speed and industry played an important part. Yet before the (early) modern plans for linear urbanization where introduces there has been a history of more or less linear urban systems.

The intent of a linear city is to concentrate urban development along a transit route and flank it with ribbons of landscape. Spain’s early modernist Arturo Soria Y Mata and the Soviet planner N. A. Miliutin advocated the concept of linear cities.

 Some examples were built, but did not stay linear for long. For example: allotment gardens separate Ørestad from Amanger to the east. A large marsh defines the new city on the west.

One of the earliest known examples is the Cypriot settlement Khirokitia, dating from the sixth century BC. These pre-modern linear settlements where often formed due to geographical or geological circumstances. As shown in the cases of Athens and the Roman via Aemilia and Via Romagnia linear urban systems could also have a military purpose. These Roman 'strings of beads' still function as an important linear urban system, contributing strongly to the North-Italian economy.

In the middle Ages the Hanseatic cities formed an important economic multipolar network.

 Khirokitia

The linear garden city

The first real design for a linear city is probably made by Arturo Soria Y Mata, who around 1880 designed his Ciudad Lineal; a linear garden-city, connecting existing Spanish urban centers, trying to diffuse the difference between urban and rural areas. The plan consists of a central railroad with on both sides gridded slabs for housing and working. Soria y Mata aimed on involving all villages around Madrid in his Ciudad Lineal, in order to bring the country to the city and the city to the country.

This has been an ideal during the whole modern movement, and also has influence on the postmodern movement. Soria stated about his plan that every point of the linear city a new community could arise as the branch on a tree. In this fashion a linear-urban network could arise. Only a small part of the plan was realised. The plan got a lot of attention in many publications and has been an important source of inspiration for later designs of linear cities. The concept of the Ciudad Lineal was further developed by designers like Gonzales de Castillo en George Beloit Levy. The linear garden-city concept has been leading concept of the linear city movement till halfway the nineteen-twenties.

The linear city as one building

Besides the linear garden city there is another concept that exists from 1900 till the 1970's; the singular plan, the linear city as one building. An early example is Edgar Chambles' Roadtown (1910). A stretched dwelling-building with a monorail system in the basement, a promenade on the roof a public spaces and shops at regular intervals. The design was made to facilitate he colonization of America's rural area.

 Magnitogorsk

The fordist linear city

At the end of the 1920's other linear concepts are developed such as the assembly-line-city, the ladder and precursors of the network city that borrowed a lot of components form the garden city concept. These designs are based on the situation of parallel zones along one single line. The form arose as the urban expression of the fordist means of production.

Combinatory linear plans

A main critique on the linear plans has been that they could not fit the social activities, housing patterns and concentrated arousal associated with cities. Attempts to resolve these critiques resulted in combinations of linear and other urban concepts. Complex examples of combined linear plans are the designs from O.F. Schweizer en Ludwig Hilbersheimer.

These designs contain many components from the assembly-line-city such as linear zoning and a main infrastructural work next to the industrial core. Difference is the broad sprawl of the hosing zones, and the highly detailed drawings. Assembly-line-cities were mostly represented as schemes or rough sketches.

Another concept for linear plans is the 'radial satellites', as a continuation of the concept of the city with radial extensions. In this concept the expanding city creates or incorporates satellites outside its surface and connects them with urbanized transportation axis.

Corridors

Halfway the nineteen-sixties in America and Europe 'development axis' and 'connection axis' are regularly mentioned in discussions on urban structure. In 1965 John Friedmann and William Alonso mention the development axis as a way to lead expansion of urban concentrations towards peripheral areas. Friedman and Alonso define development axes as "elongated corridors along principal transport routes linking two or more metropolitan regions. Their prospects for development may be said to be roughly proportional to the size of the centres they link and inversely proportional to some function of the distance separating them." 

Whebell defines a corridor as 'a linear system of urban places together with the linking surface transportation media'. He mainly describes the forming of 'unplanned corridors' as part of a 'corridor centered economic landscape' developing in time. Contradictory to this Whebell describes Hilbersheimers linear designs, which are clearly planned, as examples of modern corridors. Whebell describes an econo-spatial dialectic; a location or settlement can not be explained without considering commerce a production, and vise versa. Settlements that were founded in more fertile and more accessible locations than others were from the beginning ahead of the others and could develop as centres for trade. Therefore they could maintain a position of technological and financial superiority and make investments to improve their position such as roads, railways and highways.

For example: The space of the Netherlands, concerning spontaneous corridor development and plea for 'planned corridors', to facilitate growth and minimize spatial competition with the landscape and economical competition with the city.