The Garden City: Past, Present and Future.

Sendbuehler, Matt

Ward, Steven V., ed. The Garden City: Past, Present and Future. London: E & FN Spon, 1992. pp. xiv, 215 Maps, illustrations, black and white plates, index, bibliography by chapter. $112.50 (Hardcover only)

After labouring in obscurity for years, Ebenezer Howard initiated a revolution in urban planning with the publication in 1898 of To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform, (republished in 1902, slightly revised, under the famous title Garden Cities of To-morrow). Even by the end of his life, the movement initiated by these books and Howard's accompanying activism led to considerable action on his ideas but little if any adherence to his social reform program. The Garden City movement, despite--or perhaps because of--the rejection or distortion of Howard's social ideals in most practical projects, remains a major influence on urban planning in much of the world.

The Garden City: Past, Present and Future attempts to assess the impact of Howard's ideas in various parts of the world, and, surprisingly, to argue that these ideas have a future in the industrialized world. While there is no chapter on Canada, the book is nevertheless of interest to Canadian readers, if only because as a study in the transmission and evolution of ideas, there is much here that students of Canadian planning history will find familiar, illuminating, or both.

Although the book does deal with the present and future, it is primarily historical; as such, this is a valuable set of essays that provide a solid overview of the Garden City influences on urban planning in the countries covered. Those contributors who do deal in some depth with future prospects come to widely divergent conclusions. Robert Fishman argues persuasively that the Garden City is irrelevant in the United States today, primarily because the possibilities for building compact, relatively isolated settlements with a strong sense of community have been overtaken by the massive automobile-oriented suburban growth of the last fifty years. Dennis Hardy, in contrast, sees a promising future for the Garden City in Britain and perhaps Europe, if only environmentalists would recognize the prospects for sustainable development implicit in the types of settlements advocated by Howard.

The common thread that runs through the stories of the different national contexts is that ideals tend to be shaped, often beyond recognition, by political, social, and economic realities. In Germany, for example, Gerhard Fehl shows that the Garden City was used by the Nazis as a means of ordering and controlling space in the course of wartime territorial expansion. Taking advantage of an earlier technocratic turn in planning, and employing the talents of Walter Christaller, they used the Garden City as the basis for a new regional planning that ruthlessly manipulated populations to abstract technical and nationalist ends. In the case of Japan, Shunichi Watanabe shows that the Garden City was not received in that country as an intact set of ideas with easily usable mechanisms. Instead, consistent with the interests of a powerful landed elite, Garden City ideas reached their fullest expression in a handful of middle-class suburbs. While there was much discussion of using the Garden City to achieve substantial reforms in urban morphology, its main impact was to form the basis of planning measures designed to rationalize new suburban land use. In the case of Australia, Robert Freestone shows that the absence of a need for decentralization and the relative paucity of the poor urban living conditions that spawned the Garden City movement in Britain meant that, parallel to the Canadian case, direct Garden City influences were confined largely to housing design and resource town development.

The national coverage is uneven. With four chapters exclusively or predominantly on Britain, two on the United States, and one each on France, Japan, Germany, and Australia, there would have been room to consolidate the British and U.S. cases into two or three, instead of six chapters, leaving room for more national cases. It might be argued, however, that there remain no national cases sufficiently well-studied to merit similar treatment. In Canada, for instance, the Garden City direct influences on the urban fabric were few; and few scholars have attempted to understand the country planning history through the prism of the Garden City, and fewer still to identify and understand the specific examples of Garden City ideas in action. That means there is little literature to form the basis for a summary of Canada encounter along lines similar to the essays in this volume.

Nevertheless, there is at least a need here for some attempt to review the national cases that are as yet little-studied. In particular, I suspect that there has been an influence on less-developed countries, which goes unmentioned here. Indeed, if there is a future for Howard's program of land reform, decentralization, and small communities in which residence and industry are balanced, it is in those developing countries suffering from the effects of the emergence of enormous primate cities. Of course, any such countries that tried to adopt the Garden City would run up against many of the problems faced earlier this century in Britain and elsewhere, particularly the problem of building adequate and affordable working-class housing where capital is scarce and wages low.

On the whole, The Garden City: Past, Present, and Future is a valuable primer on an important movement in international urban planning. It is not, however, good value for money. Its hefty price tag puts the book out of reach for all but the most devoted specialists, and even, probably, for many Canadian university libraries, given current financial realities. This in itself belies some of the contributors' apparent hopes that the Garden City will once again be a widely embraced popular movement.

Matt Sendbuehler

Department of Geography

McMaster University