The idea of the garden city
Howard's Garden City
With Howard's proposal we witness the first attempt to configure a new organization of the residence in an urban framework that included vegetable gardens and gardens around the walls and paths articulated between the grass and rows of trees. Howard illustrated in his essay To-Morrow, a peaceful path to real reform (1898), an urban framework that included a clear separation between the various functions, residential, productive, commercial, cultural and recreational appear with the proposal of the garden city.
Wide, clean and busy streets inside delineate open spaces that are condensed in the great clarity of the general layout synthesized by some conceptual schemes. One of these layouts is the urban planning technique of the drive that divides the garden city into well-defined zones for characteristic activities, to which the building corresponds with a precise typological configuration.
The city is seen as a unitary organism whose parts are connected to each other according to a dense network of relationships, not only of a functional and compositional nature, but fundamentally of an economic and social nature.
Contrary to romantic expectations, Howard then continues with a series of strictly financial and commercial calculations and arguments. Among the problems analyzed by Howard with greater vigor, is that of the contractual relationship, which goes under the English name of Lease, through which the building land of Garden-City was granted in concession. Previously This relationship, comparable to a real right of surface, still has pressing current characteristics.
Schematic diagram of a typical sector of the garden city
In 1903, the construction of the first Garden City, Letchworth, fifty kilometres from London, began. The regulations were very detailed: not only were the ratios between houses and gardens prescribed, but also the type of fencing, planting, etc.
The building typologies built in the residential area of Letchworth are those of terraced houses of two or three floors, arranged along avenues more or less converging towards the center. Howard's Garden-City, despite its schematic nature, presents itself as a new model for the residence. Such an urban vision is opposed to a model of life linked to survival and unhealthy living conditions and is projected towards a modern urban culture. These theoretical and design experiences constitute the first concrete experiences on which the subsequent theoretical formulations on workers' resistance will be based.
Plan for the garden city
