From Garden City to Green City: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard

From Garden City to Green City: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard, Kermit C. Parsons and David Schuyler (eds), Baltimore, USA, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, 289 pp., £33.50 (h/b) When, as a graduate student, I first encountered Ebenezer Howard's ideas I had difficulty in comprehending their appeal. As a socialist and cooperator from a trade union family who delighted in urbanity and rejected the idiocy of rural life, I regarded the concept of garden cities as misguided and irrelevant. From Garden City to Green City is a great help in understanding Howard, but despite making the public good his life's work, he remains an enigmatic figure. Several contributors to this volume reveal very clearly the paradoxical nature of Howard's major works, especially Tomorrow (1898). Not least they identify the visionary spiritual underpinnings for Howard's ideas while revealing his lack of sympathy for contemporary movements including co-partnership, political action and unionisation. Not for Howard 'direct struggle with the problems of the world' (p. 20). He favoured experimental, utopian attempts to create a new parallel society through a network of garden cities. Tomorrow met initially with a sceptical, patronising response and in Steven Ward's words 'the really remarkable thing ... was how much of it formed a basis for real achievements' (p. 28). Defining, measuring and evaluating the impact of Howard's ideas are the central concerns of this book. It was compiled from papers presented in 1998 to a conference organised by Kermit C. Parsons, Director of the Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies at Cornell. The object was to mark the centennial of Tomorrow and Parsons hoped that the book would be 'a permanent contribution to the importance of history for contemporary planning'. Following Parsons' death in 1999, the challenge of meeting this objective was taken up by David Schuyler. To the revised original papers were added an essay by Parsons on the transatlantic interplay between American and British applications of Howard's ideas and a concluding reflective chapter by Steven Ward. Steven Ward's two contributions are in many ways the most revealing-in the first, he brings Howard to life, showing his awkward combination of organisational weakness and personal decisiveness. In his concluding chapter, Ward provides a balanced assessment of precisely where and with whom Howard had the greatest influence. He stresses Howard's importance for the planning profession chiefly in the West and in a few 'wealthy communities' in Asia and Latin America. He regrets the ease with which Howard sacrificed many of his ideals for social reform. Indeed, it is Howard's physical concept of the garden city, combining the best of town and country and surrounded by a permanent agricultural green belt, that Ward sees as his abiding if limited legacy. Ward does not altogether avoid the trap of seeing similarities between Howard's ideas and subsequent planning ideas as evidence of 'links' or even 'causal links'. Nevertheless, his contributions are very good examples of the significance of history for the understanding of planning. …