Garden City (dec 27, 1898 – mar 19, 1935)

Description:

The Physical Progressives wanted to address social issues through urban design, leading to the garden city movement.
1898 Ebenezer Howard publishes Garden Cities of Tomorrow. The main idea was to balance the benefits of town living with country living in a new creation of "town-country". He envisioned a network of towns integrated industry and agriculture, with public and civic facilities, with rings of green belts and connected by railways and highways. He also drew up an impressive economic plan for a co-op to fund the new developments - through private investment and rent payments to first service the loans and then fund social services (to create a social welfare net). Actually Howard cared more about the social program but it was the physical plan that people got attached to.

Congestion was a major problem and governments at the time did not have programs for funding housing projects. Tugwell took inspiration from Howard and promoted the need for planners to go outside of urban centers, develop some agriculturally depressed land and entice the urban population out to help reduce congestion, then go back to city centers to tear down the slums. Rather naive although idealistic thoughts.
Mechanistic world view - forget that a community is more than the buildings, but it's also the social network of people who lived there. Outsiders may see them as slums, but the people who lived there were connected to each other.

Added to timeline:

Date: