“Stick ‘Garden’ in Front, We’ll Sell More Houses”
The term ‘garden’ to describe a settlement has been perpetually hijacked, revised, stolen, and re-appropriated since its conception — and there’s a new wave on the way: the ‘Garden Communities’.
The ‘garden community’ concept is based on Sir Ebenezer Howard’s famous utopian ‘Garden City’, which was first conceived in his 1898 book ‘Garden Cities of To-morrow’. In reaction to the overcrowded and unhealthy Victorian warren streets and the linear monotony of the bylaws, Howard promoted an accessible escape to new cul-de-sacs outside of cities. He promoted low-density spacious communities of twenty-five dwellings per hectare, that had both the economic benefits of the town and social benefits of the country (Howard, 1898).
Howard’s concept preceded the popularisation of the motorcar and the mass suburban sprawl that followed throughout the twentieth century, particularly following the Radical Housing Act of 1923. The garden city typology has been perpetually reconfigured into post-war new towns and private estates into what one may now refer to as suburbia.
The current and previous national governments championed new ‘garden communities’ as a viable answer to the UK’s ‘housing crisis’, illustrated in the 2016 and 2018 prospectuses laid out by the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government [MHCLG]. In 2011 the housing Minister called for “imaginative proposals to come forward which get us back to Howard’s original ideas.” However, as a now 121-year-old idea, the conditions from which the original Garden City concept was derived have now changed and are arguably no longer applicable. Referring to the development of Ebbsfleet, Lord Richard Rogers stated that garden city proposals are a “return to the mistakes of the past”. The fundamental issue is the lack of a standardised definition.
The Town and Country Planning Association has distilled ‘the key elements that have made the Garden City model of development so successful’ into nine planning principles ‘for a 21st-century context’. However, in comparison Howard’s intricate diagrams and detailed prescriptions, the level of detail of the TCPA Garden Community principles is limited; one of which is ‘Strong vision, leadership and community engagement’ — what on Earth does this mean? The ambiguity of the principles is simply a fail-safe.
The terminological differences between the ‘Garden City’, ‘Garden Suburb’, ‘Garden Village’, ‘Garden Town’, ‘Eco-town’, and ‘Garden Community’ are minute, yet, spatially Milton Keynes Garden City is a world away from Great Notley Garden Village or Hampstead Garden Suburb. It’s no wonder that NIMBYs are so concerned with what might be built down the road.
Let's try some others out for size: Easton Park Garden Town, West Tey Garden Community, West Braintree Garden Community, North Uttlesford Garden Community, Harlow and Gilston Garden Community, Dunton Hills Garden Suburb, Monks Wood Garden Town, East Colchester Garden Community, or North East Chelmsford Garden Village — oh by the way these are all live projects, just in Essex alone. It’s a sales trick…
The Locally-Led Garden Villages, Towns and Cities 2016 report by the Department for Communities and Local Government simply defines these by the number of dwellings: a Garden village has between 1,500 to 10,000 homes and a Garden City has more than 10,000 homes. What all of the above do have in common, however, is low-density suburban housing layouts with private gardens, with a bit of extra public vegetation, but by no means does putting ‘garden’ in front of your development title mean that it’s more environmentally beneficial or even more garden-like.
Thankfully, the New Garden Cities Alliance [NGCA] is working to protect Howard’s original concept and ‘establish standards for Garden Cities’, aiming to define precisely what a ‘garden’ community is, and prevent the use or rather misuse of the term as a mere sales technique. The primary criticism of ‘garden’ developments, is like all greenfield development, it requires the conversion and consumption of the open countryside. Moreover, what is particularly problematic is the density of such developments.
Although his social concepts may not be, Howard’s initial density propositions are now out of date. To truly reconfigure the Garden City for the 21st-century, we need to rethink the physical contents of our new developments, restrict sprawl, and build new greenfield development at far higher densities.
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Samples of this text are part of ongoing Design-research studies with the Cambridge Deisgn Research Studio.
