Sustainable Communities

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Garden City

Ebenezer Howard defined a Garden City as “a city designed to ensure to its population healthy living and working conditions; its dimensions must be right sufficient to allow the full development of social life; surrounded by a rural belt, its ground being totality a public property or managed by a trust on behalf of the community.”(Howard, 1898)

Ebenezer Howard had the theory of garden cities; his reasoning for this was that most cities of industrialising countries were overcrowded with too many people living in a small place. They were also polluted from the overbearing amount of factories and workshops that were the backbone of the industrialisation, not to mention the smoke exuding from coal fires from the many buildings and houses.(Lucey, 1973) Due to this and the huge class separation, many people were living in slums with the worst quality housing if any and the quality of life for the people at the poorest end of the scale was utterly atrocious.

Garden Cities were areas of living that where neither in the city centre nor in the country side. The idea was to provide a finer, more peaceful and more naturally beautiful place to live “We want all the beauty that is here... and more also. And none of these distresses.... I believe- out of me and the Good Will in me and my kind there comes a regenerate world-cleansed of suffering and sorrow.” (H.G.Wells 1908.) They were made to be the size of a small town of around 30000 people with a further 2000 in the surrounding agricultural estates. This would have then been broken into wards of 5000 (Stephen V.Ward, 1992). The two Architects and planners Barry Parker and Raymond Unwinn, who were going to design the first of many garden cities, wanted to make small terraced housing which was both affordable and cosy, meaning that anyone could afford to live there. “The advantages of the most energetic and active town life, with all the beauty and delight of the country, may be secured in perfect...