Ebenezer Howard

Birth of the idea of the garden cities

It returns to the United Kingdom in 1876 where it is engaged by a company writing the official reports of the Parliament. Parallel to this trade which he will exert all his life, he reads much and reflects on the problems of the company. Starting from its reflections, he writes a book: To-Morrow: In Peaceful Path to Real Reform ( Tomorrow: a Pacifist Way towards the Real Reform ), published in 1898. The work is republished in 1902 under the title Garden Cities off Tomorrow ( Cités-Jardins of Tomorrow ). It militates there for the creation of a new type of cities: located in periphery of the existing cities, they would have a limited size, would be the subject of a planning and would be surrounded by agricultural spaces. It calls them the Garden-Cities ( Cités-jardins ). This new form of urbanization (or should one say suburbanisation , according to the English term) represents in its eyes the perfect example of symbiosis between the city and nature. Indeed, being located in periphery of the cities, they make it possible to live in company and to work in these last, while living in the countryside and by having the possibility of benefitting from the Nature and the contact with God.

He designs his garden city like a community, governed by a kind of board of directors. It should be built on a surface of 4 km ² at most, and the center of a territory of approximately 20 km ². Its form would be circular, with a ray of a little more than one kilometer. The urbanized part would be divided into six districts, each one being delimited by penetrating boulevards. In the center of the garden city a park surrounded of the services at disposal of the population would be created (town hall, theater, hospital, etc). The trade would be in the Crystal De luxe hotel , kind of glazed gallery protecting the inhabitants from the bad weather. The city would be surrounded by a railway line bordered of manufactures and markets. From a demographic point of view, it should not count more 30 000 inhabitants, so that each hearth can have a house surrounded by a garden.

The success of its project leads it to create the Association of the Garden cities in 1899.

Concretization

Its ideas attract the financeurs, and it can thus acquire the ground of its prototype of the garden city in 1903: Letchworth, in the north of London. The project is financed by the First Garden City Limited , company created for the occasion. The architects Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin are charged to carry out the plans of them. This last, which inspired the " part later; policy urbaine" program of New-Deal of Roosevelt US president, did not follow to the letter the regulations of Howard and was inspired, for the form of its project, those of the plan of rebuilding of London by Sir Christopher Wren in 1666: a city ordering oneself around a central place bordered of official buildings and cultural.

One second city, conceived according to the same principles, between 1905 and 1907 by Parker and Unwin in the London suburb of Hampstead, exerted a fascination such on the men of its time that the legislators writing Housing and Town Planning Act in 1909 and 1919 came from there to suggest " adoption of the model of Garden City for the construction of housing social".

Then Welwyn in 1919 builds whose plans are entrusted to the architect Louis de Soissons.

Through the concretization of its ideas, Howard answers the question that it had been posed a few years before: How to drive back the tide of the migration of the population in the cities and to return this population to the ground?

A source of inspiration

The concept of the garden city is imported in Japan by SHIBUSAWA Eiichi (澁澤栄一 1840-1931) and following the great earthquake of Tokyo in 1923, the Tôkyû company builds the circular city Den' enchôfu.

The concept of Howard also leads to the creation of the new cities after the Second world war by the British government. Thus are created more than thirty communities, like Milton Keynes.

It inspires by other town planners like Frederick Law, Olmstead II or Clarence Perry.

2003: Conference with Suresnes (92) - Homage to Howard

There is hundred years, in London, the parliamentary correspondent Ebenezer Howard published a test entitled has peaceful path to real reform (the peaceful way towards a true reform) in which it exposed proposals for a reorganization of the company. This work, caused a vast debate at once. At the time of his republication in 1902, the author chooses to propose principal reforms of which it suggested the implementation - the realization again places of life, which were to allow the eradication of the plagues such as slum, suburbs with uncontrolled extension, industrial pollution, ignorance, lack of hygiene, promiscuity, alcoholism… - the book thus appeared under the title of Garden cities off tomorrow, the garden cities of tomorrow.

A new concept had just been born, the town planners of today did not finish yet exploring all the richness of it. In Suresnes, some of them met the time of a conference and an exposure entitled “Ideas of Garden city, the exemplarity of Suresnes”, to treat topicality of this dream centenary. " The term of garden city darkens as much as it lights the bases of the urban vision of Ebenezer Howard, notes the architect Stephan Chambers, in the work published in the occasion. The terms of City and Garden appear quite selected to describe the basic elements of this social project, which seeks to neutralize the opposition city/countryside. But their combination seems to confirm the judgment of this urban model like project of dilution. Garden City would be neither city, nor campagne".

The original text of the work of Ebenezer Howard makes it possible to replace the concept in its context: England then knew a violent one rural migration who threw the former peasants in a hostile urban environment. The solution preached by Howard is well that of a city - countryside, but which, far from diluting them, would rather combine the advantages of the two lifestyles. " I, did he write will thus undertake to show, how this combination one can enjoy the equal possibilities of social life - what I say? higher - with those which offers a populeuse city, while the beauties of nature will surround, will bathe each one of its habitants".

(….)

This model was observed with attention by the French architects and politicians, in particular by Henri Sellier, teaching in administrative law, cofounder of the school of the high urban studies with Marcel Poëte. He was elected general adviser of the canton of Puteaux-Suresnes in 1908 and, in 1915, its project of Public Office of Dwellings at a cheap rate for the department of the Seine was born. Translator of the work of Raymond Unwin, it is quite naturally with the concept of Garden city that it appealed when it is a question of passing to the act and to create new districts of dwelling. " For Henri Saddler, Ginette Baty Tornikian tells, Paris and its suburbs form a single social body where the housing problem perhaps solved apart from the urban question seized in its totality. The department of the Seine draws up a project which structure agglomeration by the introduction, around Paris, of nine garden cities and twenty and one districts-jardins". The town of Suresnes, whose Henri Sellier is the mayor of 1919 to 1941 thus accommodated one of these cities, with the site of the old imperial farm of the Excavator, and with less than one kilometer of the station of Suresnes - Longchamp. The project of the architect Alexandre Maistrasse, with whom one in addition owes the construction from the Hospital Trousseau in Paris, covered a surface of 30 hectares and was ordered around two main axes crossing on a central place. Initially envisaged to accommodate 530 houses, the city, for the wire of the two modifications of the project, in 1929 and 1933, was more equipped with apartment buildings. This thickening was not made with the detriment esthetism, " to make beau" belonging to the program entrusted to the various architects, which had as a consequence the use of brick, the ironwork or the mosaic. Sanitarianism, and a certain tendency to organize what we would call today a policy of settlement, founded on the principle of social diversity, were also with the day order. Thus Amina Sellali recalls, taking again the vocabulary of the time, that the " undesirable, unmarried, artists and old men saw themselves allotted specific residences… "

" Unfortunately, notes the mayor of Suresnes Christian Dupuy, the office interdépartementale of the Paris region which ensured the management of the city dropped it in déshérence. In 1983 a vast program of rehabilitation has being launched within the framework of the Habitat procedure and Life Sociale". " The operation, specifies Amina Sellali, proceeded in 17 sections of 1983 to 1996. To preserve the integrity of the architectural unit, there no were new constructions. On the other hand public equipment was transformed and improved, public spaces, refitted and the apartments rénovés". The garden city was registered with the inventory of the picturesque sites on November 5th, 1985, it makes moreover part of the ZPPAUP of the city and, since 1989, a particular schedule of conditions relating to it is included in the payment of the POS, this, in particular, to avoid the wild extensions of the houses. Does that mean in so far as it is becoming a particular example of district of habitat-social/city-museum, with all the risks of fold on oneself that would imply? Christian Dupuy, the mayor of Suresnes believes on the contrary in the need for insufflating a new dynamism to him. He quotes some examples of resolution of the main issue of the city: its relative insulation. " Today, he says, the suresnois garden city profit on the spot from a recreational center, arranged parks and playing fields, trade of proximity, one of the gravitational markets of city etc We intervened with the RATP so as to make pass again the lines of bus inside even of the city. Because it is nothing more dangerous than to let the populations of a district be closed again on they-mêmes". " However beautiful " it could have added.

Addressing to the town planners the mayor still affirms " The garden city of Suresnes sets up past in always current model for our projects of demain". It is in any case a model semi-sparkling centenary of youth.

Elements of bibliography

Ebenezer Howard, garden cities of tomorrow, Garden cities off to-morrow Foreword of Ginette Baty- Tornikian, ED. Direction Tonka, Collection 11 - 24. 1998.

Henri Saddler, a city for all, Editions of the Lintel, a compilation of texts of the founder of the OPHBM of the Seine, prefaced by Bernard Marrey.

Marie-Pierre Deguillaume, Ginette Baty-Tornikian, Amina Sellali; Ideas of Garden city. the exemplarity of Suresnes, catalogs homonymous exposure, organized by the Town of Suresnes, the School of architecture of Paris-Belleville and the Parisian Institute seek urban architecture and company.

Pouvreau, Crown, Laborde, Gaudry, garden cities, the example of the Parisian North-East. Edition the Monitor, February 2007.

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