This brief
excerpt from Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of To-Morrow provides a
backdrop for city planning examples such as Greendale and Levittown.
Hopefully, the opening quotation: "I will not cease from mental
strife/Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand/Til we have built
Jerusalem/In England's green and pleasant land" reminds you of our
previous discussions of the City Upon a Hill. We read Howard because so
many of our forthcoming discussions of ideal public life are informed
by his optimistic, indeed infectious, narrative. I will leave the
description of his Garden City to the author, focusing instead on three
key points.
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 (p. 51). 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" (p. 55). 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: "No really sound plan of action is
in more need of artificial support than is any sound system of thought"
(p. 57).
Commerce in Garden City follows the example of World's Fairs and
exhibitions, even with the invocation of a Crystal Palace (popularized
in the 1851 London Exposition). 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"
(p. 56). 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. As we will see in our
discussions of postwar public life, the increasing encroachment of the
nation state on individual affairs renders his vision more and more
difficult to attain.
