Garden city movement

The Garden city movement was founded by Sir Ebenezer Howard in England in 1898 as an approach to urban planning. Garden cities were to be planned, self-contained communities surrounded by greenbelts, and containing carefully balanced areas of residences, industry, and agriculture.

Inspired by the Utopian novel "Looking Backward", Howard published "To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform" in 1898 (reissued in 1902 as "Garden Cities of To-morrow"), organized the Garden City Association in 1899, and founded two cities in England: Letchworth Garden City in 1903, and Welwyn Garden City in 1920. (Letchworth is commonly referred to as such, and Welwyn called by its full name.) Both designs are durable successes and healthy communities today, although not a full realization of Howard's ideals.

The idea of the garden city was influential in the United States (in Radburn, New Jersey, Jackson Heights, New York, and Garden City, New York, on Long Island), in German worker housing built in the Weimar years, and again in England after World War II, when the New Towns Act triggered the development of many new communities based on Howard's egalitarian vision. The garden city movement also influented the British urbanist Sir Patrick Geddes in the planning of Tel-Aviv, Israel.

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