Ebenezer Howard

Originally published in 1898 as To-Morrow: A peaceful path to reform, "the book", writes F.J. Osborn "holds a unique place in town planning literature, is cited in all planning bibliographies, stands on the shelves of the more important libraries, and is alluded to in most books on planning; yet most of the popular writers on planning do not seem to have read it - or if they have read it, to remember what it says." The book led directly to two experiments in town-founding that by imitation, and imitation of imitation, have had a profound influence on practical urban development throughout the world. The book was responsible for the introduction of the term Garden City in numbers of languages - Cite-Jardin, Gartenstadt, Ciudad-jardin, Tuinstad - and set into motion ideas that have helped transform the scientific and political outlook on town structure and town growth. With urban renewal and the development of suburban communities as features of the contemoprary American scene, Garden cities of To-Morrow becomes "must" reading. In the words of Lewis Mumford: "This is not merely a book for Technicians: above all it is a book for citizens, for the people whose actively expressed needs, desires and interests should guide the planner and administrator at every turn." This book was first published in it's current form in 1965.

The founder of the Garden City Association outlines his radical new approach to urban planning. First published in 1898.

Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) is famous worldwide for founding the Garden City movement, and he continues to be frequently cited by planners and theorists. When he was dying, he urged his prospective biographer to remember that 'the spiritual dimension' had always been central to his life and work. He wanted this to be prominently brought out in any biography. Almost a century after his death, Ebenezer Howard: Inventor of the Garden City is the first book that does justice to that wish. Frances Knight has written a very readable biography, the first since the 1980s, with a properly contextualized analysis of Howard's religious views. Shaped in the world of London Congregationalism, he became a keen seeker after unity and peace. He grafted new religious ideas, particularly from spiritualism, and later from Theosophy, into his biblically-informed, Protestant faith. Prone to spiritual epiphanies, he believed that he had been raised up to preach the 'gospel of the garden city' and to tackle the housing crisis by beginning to build the New Jerusalem in the Hertfordshire countryside. Although he sometimes appeared naïve, he was astute, and highly skilled at combining different, and sometimes conflicting, ideas in a way that built consensus and gained support from people across the social and political spectrum. As well as explaining the remarkable sequence of events that led from the publication of his ideas to the foundation of Letchworth as the world's first garden city, just five years later, this book investigates other neglected aspects of Howard's life including: the years he spent in America, his career as a shorthand writer, and his relationship with his first wife Lizzie - herself an important garden city pioneer. Howard wanted his garden cities to be places of spiritual exploration, and as this book shows, early Letchworth certainly lived up to those expectations.

Ebenezer Howard is recognised as a pioneer of town planning throughout the industrialised world; Britain's new towns, deriving from the garden cities he founded, are his monument. But Howard was more than a town planner. He was first and foremost a social reformer, and his garden city was intended to be merely the first step towards a new social and industrial order based on common ownership of land. This is the first comprehensive study of Howard's theories, which the author traces back to their origins in English puritan dissent and forward to Howard's attempt to build his new society in microcosm at Letchworth and Welwyn.

Ebenezer Howard, an Englishman, and Jane Jacobs, a naturalized Canadian, personify the twentieth century's opposing outlooks on cities. Howard had envisaged small towns, newly built from scratch, fashioned on single family homes with small gardens. Jacobs embraced existing inner-city neighbourhoods emphasizing the verve of the living street. From Howard's idea, the American Dream of garden suburbs had emerged, yet his conceptualization of a modern city received criticism for being uniform and alienated from the rest of the city. Similarly, at the turn of the new century, Jacobs' inner-city neighbourhoods came to be recognized as the result of commodification, vacillating between poverty and newly discovered hubs of urban authenticity. Presenting Howard and Jacobs within a psychocultural context, The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard addresses our urban crisis in the recognition that "city form" is a gendered, allegorical medium expressing femininity and masculinity within two founding features of the built environment: void and volume. Both founding contrasts bring tensions, but also the opportunities of fusion between pairs of urban polarities: human scale against superscale, gait against speed, and spontaneity against surveillance. Jacobs and Howard, in their respective attitudes, have come to embrace the two ancient archetypes, the Garden and the Citadel, leaving it to future generations to blend their two contrarian stances.

Ebenezer Howard's iconic "Garden Cities of To-Morrow," published in 1902, spawned an international movement for the creation of Garden Cities in the early twentieth century and serves as a foundation text for modern planning theory. Contemporary planning efforts such as New Urbanism and Smart Growth look to Howard's concepts for inspiration, and this volume introduces fundamental ideas such as green belts and lays the foundations of Transit-Oriented Development. Also included in this new edition is the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association's follow-up work "The Garden City Movement Up-To-Date," published in 1913, fifteen years after Howard's first edition. This update provides valuable information, including plans and photographs, of the early years of the movement for Garden Cities like Letchworth and Hampstead. Supplemental information such as "missing" diagrams from Howard's earlier edition "To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform" and up-to-date financial figures are also included in this volume. This work, one of the "Foundations of Urban Planning" series, is required reading and deserves to be included in any urban planner's or architect's bookshelf.

Sociable Cities assesses how Howard's work has faced up to the concerns of the 20th Century.