The idea of garden city……..

The concept of town planning was firstly inspired from the very
famous book ‘garden cities of tomorrow’ by Sir Ebenezer Howards.
Different sets of people had different standpoint on this book. Some
set of people criticize the book after reading it once while, some people
had not fully understood it on the other hand some people had not
even read it once. The beginning of the 20th century witnessed the one
of the greatest invention of the mankind which includes the invention
of aeroplane and the garden city. The both invention gave man a
vision towards flying and other one assured him a better living space.
The both invention had been devised by the great Leonardo da Vinci.
He proposed a plan in Milan by building a group of ten cities of five
thousand houses for thirty thousand inhabitants each and he also
proposed to design a streetscape alongside a garden attached to
municipal irrigation system. Mr Howard was not yet influenced by the
Vinci, as his notebooks were not yet published in English. Spence,
the land reformer; James Buckingham who had published a plan for
a model industrial town in around 1848; Henry George and Peter
Kropotkin also matched Mr Howard’s intuitions and beliefs.

Howards follow the concept of the wright brothers and emphasized

mainly in the term parallelism because it points to a functional
relationship that had too often been overlooked even by those who
advocated the garden city. In other words he wanted to say that if the
aeroplane, in its present is to be anything but a menace to health and
safety then slowly as the time passes by it will become as much as
utmost part of our life as motorcar now is, it will be so only after the
garden city, with its wide belt of open land, it will surely become the
dominant urban form. The sole characteristic of the garden city was
Howard’s alleged plan for lowering the density of the population to
‘twelve houses to acre’. People had discovered that fact during the
Middle Ages and built their shelters i.e. summer houses. In early
times towns, in New England cramped the concept of ‘twelve houses
to acre’ and the same fact hold true of many Englishmen and their
suburbs that had been built during the middle of the 19th century.
The silly idea of this concept was later dropped. Now, the subject of
open planning versus the closed planning was capable of rational
discussion on its own grounds. Unwin, the co-planner of the
Letchworth, demonstrated that even from an economic point of view
there is nothing gained by overcrowding. Later he showed that ample
amount of capital had been wasted in duplicating unnecessary streets

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and in robbing people of garden space under the pseudo idea that
crowding house tighter would reduce the costs.

In the concrete details of Mr Howard was still under the spell of the
age that lay behind him. The structure crystal palace road, with its
great shopping district under glass, facing a wide open face, partly
reminds one of the glass covered streets in Edinburgh. Later, Howard
made one brilliant decision of technical innovation which had passed
almost unnoticed and was later forgotten in the development of
garden cities that followed the tagline of ‘a belt on green’ which
ultimately gave rise to the division of the towns in the separate towns.
Howard sketched the new type of the city planning following all the
aspects and actual conditions. Later, Messrs, Unwin and parker also
joined Mr Howard.

Howard mentioned that the most important point to remember is that

the garden city principle deals with the constants in planning and his
prime contribution was to outline the nature of a balanced community
and to show what the basic requirements are for an ill organised and
disoriented society and to bring it to the existence. Later he explained
about the two sectors of the cities and its current situation. In the
very first situation continued growth of centres like London, Paris and
Berlin are becoming a developed sector while on the other hand the
other part of the country was equally facing poverty. Agriculture
started losing much of its market. After this encounter Howard deal
with whole problem of the city development. In treating rural sector
and urban sector as a one single problem, Howard was one step ahead
of his age he was better diagnostician of city problems. His concept
was not only an attempt to relieve the congestion of the big city.
Howard noticed that there was no solution of the city’s problems
within the existing framework of the government body, because one of
its greatest problems was the lack of the economy, social and political
relation to the surrounding countryside. After sometime his idea
strikes to communities.

The states during the last decades on the elements of planning had
probably worked. People realised that this book is not merely a book
for technicians above all it’s a book for the citizens. Howard ideas laid
the foundation for a new cycle in urban civilization.

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 ARCHITECTURAL THEORY

SUMMARY ON THE GARDEN CITY IDEA AND

MODERN PLANNING BY LEWIS MUMFORD.

NAME –VISHAL DAS

ROLL NO.15 DIV.A
SEMESTER -03

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