Garden Cities: A flawed model for Ecological Urbanism?

As recently as April 2014, a press conference at Westminster saw the thenDeputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg insist ‘Planned garden cities can help tackle the need for housing in southern England without inflicting the same level of damage on the countryside as urban sprawl’. Prime Minister David Cameron described his vision for future communities as ‘green, planned, secured with gardens’ (The Independent, 7 November, 2013). It could be argued that recent plans for the creation of new Garden Cities in the UK seem to be more focused on a nostalgic architectural aesthetic than the principles originally set out by Howard, often omitting local agriculture, a prominent feature of Howard’s design. It could be argued that Howard’s proposal of the Garden City is a more sustainable model than what is currently being suggested under the same label. This chapter aims to explore Howard’s original proposal and using an analysis of the metrics proposed, establish whether the Garden City is indeed a valid model for ecological urbanism.