{"id":227,"date":"2017-08-23T12:22:58","date_gmt":"2017-08-23T11:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theoneplanetlife.com\/?p=227"},"modified":"2017-08-23T12:22:58","modified_gmt":"2017-08-23T11:22:58","slug":"how-to-build-a-garden-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoneplanetlife.com\/cy\/how-to-build-a-garden-city\/","title":{"rendered":"How to build a garden city"},"content":{"rendered":"
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An ambitious new book is a thorough attempt both to tell the history of the garden city movement in Britain and to provide guidance on planning and creating such a city now.<\/strong><\/p>\n

While it is extremely useful, it does largely overlook the crucial issue of food provision. Although mostly about England, the principles can be adopted anywhere.\u00a0\"\"<\/p>\n

The Art of Building a Garden City:<\/em><\/a> Designing new communities for the 21st Century<\/em> is a new manual published by the Royal Institute of British Architecture and written by Kate Henderson, Katy Lock and Hugh Ellis, for the Town and Country Planning Asssociation (TCPA).
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Let\u2019s look at its strong points first. The TCPA has long campaigned for more garden towns and villages. This book, written by three of its officials, represents this campaign.<\/p>\n

Garden cities have in recent years been championed by the British government as a sustainable means of building houses, but there has been concern that the idea has been appropriated by certain developers who would not necessarily develop the most sustainable plans.<\/p>\n

The origin of garden cities<\/h3>\n

Ebenezer Howard<\/a>, was a socialist reformer and the founder of the Garden City movement, and his idea was to provide \u201ca web of solutions as to how we could live, from energy and local food to access to green space and health care\u201d. Letchworth, the first Garden City, was created in 1903, and Welwyn in 1920. They were an antidote to unhealthy, smoke-choked, sewer-less Victorian slums.<\/p>\n

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Howard founded the Garden City Association, which became the Town and Country Planning Association. Finance for the cities came from rich investors who received interest from rents. He tried to get financial support from working class cooperative organisations but didn\u2019t succeed. As a result he had to ditch his plans for a cooperative ownership scheme with no landlords, and introduce short-term rent increases.<\/p>\n

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George Cadbury<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This lack of control over ownership meant that later these lovely homes in desirable places became priced out of the reach of the working class. This book, in a chapter on financing, goes some way to addressing this problem, advocating the creation of Community Land Trusts<\/a>, which are able to take advantage of the rise in land value caused by the development, while being able, in principle at least, to attach conditions that mean that the homes they rent out cannot be sold later at a vast profit.<\/p>\n

Howard, and other reformers such as George Cadbury, who created the model village of Bournville in 1893, provided gardens and allotments for each home so that residents could grow their own healthy food. This they did, for the Enclosure Acts, enacted between 1604 and 1914, had robbed the majority poor of common land for grazing and cultivation, and slums in industrial cities had no gardens.<\/p>\n

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Bournville village<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The provision of large gardens for this purpose was continued in the creation of municipal social housing after the second world war in many English cities such as Nottingham and Birmingham. Many working-class people, for the first time, had private indoor toilets, bathrooms, hot running water, electric lighting and private garden space. Their quality was much higher than social housing being built at the same time in mainland Europe.<\/p>\n