![]() ![]() Almost to a man, these professionals treated Howard’s proposals as pathetically unrealistic, utopian, or impractical and even when confronted with the fait accompli of two garden cities they demonstrated to their own satisfaction that their success was meaningless and that if Howard had heeded their objections in time he would never have sought to build them. ![]() One might compile an amusing list of the urban experts whose antagonism to Howard’s work was equalled only by their ignorance of the history of the city itself. As so often with Leonardo, he here outlined the garden city principle four centuries before Howard. It was precisely the swinish overcrowding of Milan that prompted Leonardo da Vinci to propose to the Duke of Milan to replace Milan’s disorder and foulness by building ten cities, each with a population of thirty thousand people. But the historic fact is that the existence of cities without gardens is a symptom of urban pathology: a by-product of high land values and low life-values. People who regard garden and city as antithetical terms must dismiss all the once-beautiful squares and parks of Bloomsbury, Mayfair, Edinburgh, and Bath as betrayals of urbanity. One would think that “garden” was another name for “open sewer” and one might fancy that the very notion of a city with gardens in it was an offense against the essential functions of urban living-though every historic aristocracy has looked upon the urban garden as one of the essential marks of its position and wealth. One of the amazing facts about Howard’s book is that, though it is among the most modest and most reasonable pieces of expository prose that I know, the very title seems to provoke such violent opposition that its critics never go so far as to read the book. It is perhaps the reaction against grim bureaucratic erections on the model that Le Corbusier advocated that has suddenly revived interest in Sir Ebenezer’s master idea. Le Corbusier’s Vertical Garden City is a sterile caricature of Howard’s essential idea, with all Howard’s ingratiating humanity and good sense left out. On a superficial view, it is true, Le Corbusier’s The City of To-morrow has had far more visible success, for it harmonized with the mechanistic preconceptions and bureaucratic requirements of our contemporary economy. No casual reader who turns immediately to Howard’s text without reading Sir Fredric osborn’s Introduction or my expository essay will possibly understand how this modest little tract could actually have come to be the most important book on the planning of cities that has appeared in the last century. But suddenly in 1946, this smoldering idea, carefully kept from going out by a few dedicated people, burst into flame and during the last decade garden cities, now called New Towns, have been multiplying all over the world and have even been taken up in the United States, after a fashion, by enlightened real estate operators looking for profitable long term investments. Henry Wright, and Clarence Stein in the United States, Howard had no influence whatever- pace Jane Jacobs!-upon official planning or academic thinking. Apart from a handful of planners, Unwin, Parker, Abercrombie in England. From the beginning this book lived an underground existence, even though within five years of its first publication in 1898, the first Garden City was actually begun. Clarence Stein, and myself, who staked our reputations on persistently advocating the ideas first put forward by Ebenezer Howard some sixty-seven years ago. At least it produces hilarity-not unmixed with obvious Schadenfreude-in a few people like Osborn. ![]() The appearance of Garden Cities of To-morrow in an American paperback brings to an almost hilarious climax this book’s astonishing career. ![]()
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