Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community / Edition 1

by Stanley Buder

Overview

For nearly a century the Garden City movement has represented one end of a continuum in an ongoing debate about the future of the modern city. In 1898 Ebenezer Howard envisioned an experimental community as the alternative to huge, teeming cities. Small, planned "garden cities" girdled by greenbelts were to serve in time as the "master key" to a higher, more cooperative stage of civilization based on ecologically balanced communities. Howard soon founded an international planning movement which ever since has represented a remarkable blend of accommodation to and protest against urban changes and the rise of the suburbs. In this interconnected history of the Garden City movement in the United States and Britain, Buder examines its influence, strengths and limitations. Howard's garden city, he shows, joined together two very different types of late-nineteenth-century experimental communities, creating a tension never fully resolved. One approach, utopian and radical in nature, challenged conventional values; the other, the model industrial towns of "enlightened" capitalists, reinforceed them. Buder traces this tension through planning history from the nineteenth-century world of visionaries, philanthropy, and self help into our own with its reliance on the expert, bureaucracy, and governmental policy, shedding light on the complex changes in the way we have thought in the twentieth century about community, urban design, and indeed the process of change. His final chapters examine the world-wide enthusiasm for "New Towns" between 1945-1975 and recent political and social trends which challenge many fundamental assumptions of modern planning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195061741
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/26/1990
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.56(h) x 1.01(d)

About the Author

City University of New York

Table of Contents

1.	An Inward Quest	3
2.	Land Reform in an Urban Age	14
3.	Ebenezer Howard and Hard Times	26
4.	The American Cooperative Commonwealth	38
5.	Toward a New Urban Vision: Howard in the 1890s	54
6.	The Search for Environment	64
7.	The Building of a Garden City, 1899-1920	77
8.	The Garden City and Town Planning, 1903-1918	96
9.	Howard and Welwyn Garden City, 1910-1940	116
10.	The International Movement, 1900-1940	133
11.	The Garden City Movement in America, 1900-1941	157
12.	British New Towns, 1945-1980	181
13.	The Future of the Garden City	199
	Notes	217
	Bibliographical Essay	249
	Index	251

Editorial Reviews

"Carefully researched, cogently argued, and gracefully written...Buder argues compellingly for a humanistic reorientation in planning. This book chalenges planners to understand their past as an essential step in redefining and revitalizing their profession."—American Planning Association Journal

"Buder's most significant contribution...is his analysis of how, in the building of Letchworth, other well-intentioned men subverted Howard's utopian ideal."—Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

"Visionaries and Planners ably presents Howard's sources of inspiration and the intellectual influences of the late nineteenth century contributing to the garden city idea."—Reviews in American History

"This is one of the landmark books in urban studies to appear in recent years and will surely take its place among the best books of 20th-century planning history. As such, it deserves a place in academic libraries at every level, and a readership ranging from undergraduates to veteran scholars."—CHOICE

From the Publisher