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Are Garden Cities Still Relevant? |
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Alexander Garvin
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There is no American municipality that owns all the land within its boundaries and rents that land to its occupants. Howard proposed municipal land ownership as a way of capturing the value of community investment in infrastructure and public facilities. In America, where the right to own property is imbedded in the constitution, the increase in property values that results from community investments is captured quite effectively in the form of increased real estate tax assessments.
The idea that garden city residents should purchase their food from farmers who occupy surrounding agricultural greenbelts was ridiculous from the start. Why would anybody forego the chance to pay the lower prices made possible by more efficient production techniques in more appropriate locations and climates?
The notion that people should live and work in the same small community was unrealistic. Most people don't want to be trapped in company towns. They want the ability to move from job to job. They want to choose their residence based on their personal assessment of schools for their children and available shopping and recreation opportunities. They want to be able to sell their home and move elsewhere whenever they desire.
The reason Howard's ideas have persisted in the United States is that they were given persuasive physical form by Clarence Stein and popularized by Lewis Mumford. Olmsted's combination of city and country consisted of two elements: the public realm (streets, sidewalks, and small parks) and individually-owned house lots. Stein added a third element: open space owned and used in common by neighboring residents.
Although Stein and his partner Henry Wright had experimented with a combination of city at country in Sunnyside, Queens, their version of the garden city first appeared in Radburn, New Jersey in 1928. Like so many of the communities planned by the Olmsted firm, it was really a garden suburb, rather than a garden city. With the exception of convenience retailing, it was entirely residential and with the exception of one apartment complex, entirely low density.
Both Olmsted's and Stein's versions of the garden suburb have been challenged by a growing body of architects and planners led by Andres Duany. These "new urbanists" decry both Olmstedian "horse and buggy" suburbs with their broad, endlessly meandering roadways and Steinian "motor age" suburbs with their cul-de-sacs and hidden (often gated) open spaces. This critique is justified only when it is applied to projects executed by imitators who misunderstood their work. In fact, the garden suburb, whether in the form advocated by Olmsted or Stein is as relevant for the 21st century as it has been up to now.
Over nearly a century, the Olmsted firm (whether managed by the senior Olmsted or his two sons) produced quite a variety of garden suburbs. In some, like Riverside, Illinois or Forest Hills Gardens, Queens, the design enlivens an uninteresting, flat site. Others like Palos Verdes Estates, California and Indian Hills in Louisville, Kentucky exploit the capabilities of an inflected topography. To insure good drainage and easy travel, roads were placed along ledges, on the crests of hills, or in valleys. Some communities were landscaped in a manner that responded to the local environment. Pinehurst, North Carolina, for example, is planted entirely with evergreens. At the Highlands, outside Seattle, the landscaping consists of local varieties of fir, cedar, madrona, and rhododendron.
The Olmsted firm determined the width of roadways based on their function. Streets had to be wide enough to carry carriage, delivery wagon, and later motor vehicle traffic. These vehicles did not have to mount steep slopes, because the firm avoided locating streets in those areas of a site. The curving roadways the firm designed (whether fitted to the topography or placed in a manner to create interesting views) guaranteed that very few lots were of the same size and shape. It avoided monotonous, repetitive siting and provided for a variety of house and household sizes. These streets are still convenient today when they are used for FedEx truck deliveries, recyclable garbage pick-ups school busing, and automobile commuting by adult members of the household.
All good planning should be sensitive to topography, local environmental conditions, and traffic flow. The new urbanists may be correct in criticizing the endless loops and curving collector streets of so many of our garden suburbs. However, this criticism does not apply to the work of the Olmsted firm. It applies to planners, architects, and developers who did not understand or chose not to apply these principles and simply duplicated the external trappings of Olmstedian suburbia.
Stein's conception of the garden suburb, though masterfully marketed by Lewis Mumford, was largely ignored by the real estate industry until the advent of condominium communities in the 1960s. As more and more open land was taken for suburban subdivisions and competition increased, developers who sought building permits had to offer more than just shelter. Public agencies were more likely to approve site plans that included common open space. Because a condominium's common open space was paid for by the developer, politicians who had never heard of "the Radburn idea," advocated it as an attractive, money-saving method of providing recreation space without appropriating money to pay for it. Developers were eager to oblige because they saw common open space as a marketing feature with which to outsell the competition.
Stein's version of the garden suburb continues to have great appeal. Its open spaces are more useful than the carefully preserved wilderness that masquerades as public open space in so many planned communities. It almost always is better maintained that local parks. Critics are right in objecting to the secluded (frequently gated) character of this open space. In many places it consists of little more than a fenced-in swimming pool with an adjacent small building referred to as the "community center." Stein's garden suburbs provided far more land and joined it together into a continuous "open space backbone" that functioned more like a park than a common yard shared by a few families.
Many of the Olmsted's firm's subdivisions are now designated historic districts. As we become more familiar with the firm's design techniques, the deficiencies of its imitators will become increasingly evident. More important, subdivision developers and designers will become increasingly likely to follow Olmsted's example and create garden suburbs that are fitted to the capabilities of their sites.
The Radburn idea, however watered down, is now the suburban model of choice. Planners have enshrined it in cluster zoning ordinances. Developers who have never heard of Stein, Wright or Mumford, group buildings around cul-de-sacs and market their product from "community centers". Their projects routinely include "common open space," a swimming pool, and sometimes tennis courts, indoor exercise facilities, and children's play equipment.
We should celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Howard's provocative book. But we should also stop asking if his ideas are still relevant. They are not any more relevant today than they were 100 years ago. What is relevant is the combination of the best of city and country that is exemplified in the work of Frederick Law Olmsted and Clarence Stein.
Alexander Garvin, Commissioner
New York City Planning Commission
Professor of Urban Planning and Management
Yale University