Garden Cities, a successful experiment
Don’t be mislead by the leafy, middle-class appearance of towns like Letchworth and Welwyn. Beneath the surface they are a radical and successful century-long experiment into social reform and sustainable communities.
An excellent programme by Dan Cruikshank on BBC Radio 4 on the 17th October 2016 (available online for the next few weeks) made clear just how radical was the vision of Ebenezer Howard, whose concepts were the inspiration for Letchworth.
It is a vision that is needed just as much now as it was at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Howard’s concepts were not simply for urban planning but also for what he called ‘community management’ — the fundamentals of ownership, finance and management.
Letchworth is owned by the community (through a trust). This ‘industrial and provident society’ now has assets of £127m and is able to reinvest £7m of profit each year back into the community.
Howard was concerned that property developers and management companies made communities less sustainable, by removing capital from the system as profit.
Land value is owned by the community. Rising land values (largely driven by permissions and infrastructure improvements) can destabilise the balance of a community, making it hard to prevent development that might not be in their best interests.
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In the UK now, we are desperately short of housing and what there is, is largely priced out of the reach of lower income and young occupiers.
Labour policy is to build 200,000 new homes a year by 2020, the Liberal Democrats equivalent figure is 300,000. That is 20-30 new Letchworths each year. But who will own them?
The Liberal Democrats’ plans for housing are the most ambitious of any UK political party. Their 2015 election manifesto includes (p. 91–99) a proposal for 10 new Garden Cities and also says that;
We will also pilot techniques for capturing the increase in land values from the granting of planning permission, helping to deliver our Garden Cities.
This is encouraging, but even so it is hard to see how the UK will be able to move from its addiction to a private sector, profit-driven approach to housing (and the tax revenues that this produces). It seems to me that an updated Garden City ownership model is one that should be adopted if we want our children’s children to have affordable places to live within real communities.
Placemaking and community today is about a layer of digital services and networks, as well as the balanced design of buildings, open spaces, infrastructure and other facilities. How would Ebenezer Howard have revised his ideas for our age?
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If you want to know more about how the economic and social ideas behind the Garden City concept are being debated today, this is an excellent article by Ben Clark of The Architectural Review.
