Concept of Garden City by Ebenezer Howard | Concept of Howard's Garden City

What it takes to build Ebenezer Howard's Garden City?

Ebenezer Howard, a Londoner, parliamentary reporter, and a guy who liked to think about important subjects, released his first and only book in 1898. He articulated his thoughts on how to establish a healthy city in his book "Tomorrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform." In 1902, the book was reprinted with the snappy title "Garden Cities of Tomorrow." The garden city was Howard's solution to the urban and human conditions of nineteenth-century London, and it remains one of the most compelling concepts on how to design a city. Garden City has been butchered and misread in several ways, but its significance is immense, and it is essential to attempt to comprehend it.

Ebenezer Howard

Howard's first brilliant idea was to see human settlements as magnets with the ability to attract people. You may either stay in the country or migrate to a major city. In the countryside, you were in touch with nature's beauty, tranquility, fresh air, and sunshine, but life may be dull and backward, with few growth opportunities. So you relocated to a larger city in search of better employment. This was a land of possibility and cultural amusements, but it was also dirty, foggy, and far too costly to live in.

People continued to flock to already congested towns because they were greater magnets, yet something was plainly out of balance in the burgeoning modern world. People were agitated, nervous, and overworked. The pendulum has swung too far in one direction in the overcrowded towns, and something vital has been left behind. Here's another of Howard's brilliant observations. If a decision is presented as either/or. This suggests that two are probably bad, and the true breakthrough will be to find the third. As a result, the city and the countryside should marry, and a third child will be born; the perfect synthesis of nature and society, as well as the ultimate human home. There are no disadvantages.

Garden City will become the greatest magnet, naturally attracting people from congested areas, with this new type of community. Howard was not an architect, thus he was not preoccupied with the physical layout of his ideal communities, but he was pretty clear about the characteristics of the new town-country magnets. So, if you wanted to establish a true Garden City like Howard imagined it, here is how you would go about it.

Step 1: Find a group of reputable pioneers who are equally committed to building the town properly.

Step 2: You now need to acquire some land. You most likely do not have enough money, therefore you must borrow some to purchase land. You will be purchasing a six thousand acre plot of property in the middle of nowhere, the cheapest acreage available.

Step 3: Now that you have some, it would be a good idea to collect some specialists, such as architects, civil engineers, and landscape gardeners, to assist you in developing a plan for your city. Remember that only the center thousand acres of your property will be used for the city; the surrounding five thousand acres must be reserved for a green belt of farmland and farms.

Step 4: This is an important step. You must persuade several industrialists to relocate their plants to a new town. These manufacturers will then bring employees and other specialists who will begin to build homes in your community. This town you're constructing is designed to be a self-contained, autonomous community. So, now that you have some residents, you must ensure that they have all they require in the town itself.

Step 5: The property on which it is constructed will be entirely owned by its residents, which is the key characteristic of your tone. Once you have repaid the loan you took out to buy the property and have begun to develop your town from scratch, you can utilize the rising value of the land to create a welfare fund for your residents. In this manner, the community will benefit from the entire gain in land value. The town's residents will take good care of it since they will feel like they own it.

Step 6: Keep in mind that your town is not meant to flourish endlessly. The greenbelt that surrounds it must be rigorously protected. The community should stop developing until it reaches a population of roughly 32 thousand people.

Step 7: This is the most incredible part. Once your town has reached its capacity, a new one should be established nearby on the same principles, and then another, and another, and another. All of these lovely tiny towns will be linked by high-speed railroads, resulting in an interlinked polycentric system of healthy and self-sufficient communities.

This was Howard's vision for an ideal way to dwell in the planet's systems of lovely and healthy garden cities, small jewels nestled among delectable green belts, each with its own distinct personality, each dearly valued and properly cared for by residents. This would be a true example of mother nature's town-country attraction. People in the city will prosper since they will have everything they need nearby and will never be bored because they will be able to hop on a train and visit a neighboring city. It's a captivating vision, but it's never been fulfilled in its entirety, and it's not for want of trying; people were moved by Howard's concept and began attempting to develop garden towns straight once, such as Letchworth and Welwyn.

There have been several garden villages, garden suburbs, and garden satellites built with varying degrees of success, but never the thing itself. Perhaps Howard's most important aim was to presume that you can produce a powerful magnet, then de-magnetize it and enclose everything with a green belt when it has attracted enough. A strong magnet will attract since it is inherently magnetic. It will attract from weaker magnets and will very likely attract from de-magnetized ones, but the magnetism of the garden city concept remains strong. So much of what is being constructed and proposed for cities now can be traced back to a small book published at the close of the nineteenth century in London.

What makes an idea so constantly enticing among the muck and chaos of the contemporary city? An image of an ideal human environment as a perfect synthesis of nature and culture has congregated in the mind of humanity. This ideal still leads and motivates us to dream, plan, create, and construct. Howard was the first to define it well enough to set out a solution and provide us a vision, the Garden City, and if we don't create it now, we'll always put it off till tomorrow.