Volume 4, Number 5 · April 8, 1965
Revaluations I: Howard's Garden City
By Lewis Mumford
Garden Cities of To-morrow
by Ebenezer Howard, edited with a Preface by Sir Frederic Osborn, with an Introductory Essay by Lewis Mumford
M.I.T., 168 pp., $1.95
The appearance of Garden Cities of To-morrow in an American paperback brings to an almost hilarious climax this book's astonishing career. At least it produces hilarity—not unmixed with obvious Schadenfreude—in a few people like Osborn. Clarence Stein, and myself, who staked our reputations on persistently advocating the ideas first put forward by Ebenezer Howard some sixty-seven years ago. From the beginning this book lived an underground existence, even though within five years of its first publication in 1898, the first Garden City was actually begun. Apart from a handful of planners, Unwin, Parker, Abercrombie in England. Henry Wright, and Clarence Stein in the United States, Howard had no influence whatever—pace Jane Jacobs!—upon official planning or academic thinking. But suddenly in 1946, this smoldering idea, carefully kept from going out by a few dedicated people, burst into flame; and during the last decade garden cities, now called New Towns, have been multiplying all over the world; and have even been taken up in the United States, after a fashion, by enlightened real estate operators looking for profitable long term investments.
Review, 2768 words
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