Reinterpreting the Garden City Concept

Robert FreestoneFaculty of the Built EnvironmentUniversity of New South Wales

Sydney, Australia

CHINESE PLANNING NETWORK, BEIJING, JUNE 2006

The Master Key

Town-Country Magnet

The Social City

Correct principle of a city’s growth

Raymond Unwin’s adaptation of the garden city model

Moscow, Wroclaw, London

Letchworth, Welwyn

Greenbelt towns, US

New towns, UK

Garden suburbs of the world

Town Country magnet for today

Hall and Ward (1998)

Some arguments for new communities

• reduces pressures for piecemeal development • provides cost-effective investment in infrastructure• provides a more economical use of land • minimises the environmental impacts of urban growth• provides a high quality of design and layout• provides opportunities for balanced housing and

employment growth• ensures continuity of supply of development land• provides opportunities for creating socially mixed

communities

Pacione (2004)

Popular ‘garden towns’

in China

Xiangfan

Suzhou

Chinese city history

(Wu, 2003)

Nanjing Garden Suburb, 1930s

Shanghai satellite towns, 1960s

Beijing Riviera development, 2000s

Zhenjiang’s Nanxu New Town project

Songjiang ‘Garden City’, Shanghai

Dongton eco city, Shanghai

Garden city values for Asia• Sustainablility

• Greenness • Organicism

• Compactness• Coexistence with rural environments

• Diversity• Continuity

• Community development• Social tenure • Social justice • Civic space• Flexibility

• Design guidelines• Co-partnerships

• Holism

Constraints and challenges

• Urban growth far outstripping urban changes wrought by the industrial revolution

• Urbanisation of the countryside via extended metropolitan region

• The emergence of the global city • Concerns about the availability of building

land

Constraints to sustainable community planning

(Campbell, 1996)

Flexible space: not a blueprint

The future?

Think what it would mean at the start of the 21st century, not just in Howard’s England but still more in nations grappling with city-building worldwide, if they could somehow appropriate and build on the qualities Howard so brilliantly brought to the task: a utopian vision of an altogether better way of living together in cities, coupled with the practical common sense that would make it achievable. Perhaps the real legacy of [Howard] is to tell us that if we think that way, combining breadth of vision with hard practicality on mundane details, we can truly build an urban world almost beyond our present imaginations.

(Hall, Hardy and Ward, 2003)