Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
for Fishman (1982), Howard, Le Corbusier and Wright's utopianism represents
coherent bodies of thought that transcend the immediate situation and whose
realization would break the bonds and cultural restrictions imposed by conventional
wisdom. Their utopian visions were the three-dimensional expressions of social
philosophies advocating human peace, beauty and harmonious living with nature.
For Howard, the emphasis was on healthy, co-operative and compact communities
of no more than 30,000 people. His garden cities would relieve pressure on the big
cities, combat urban alienation and reconnect people to the natural world. In the
twenty-first century Philip Ross, a former mayor of Letchworth, one of the original
garden cities, has revitalized interest in the garden city ideal. He argues that the
garden city is not about architecture or new developments but community, where
the measure of success is the happiness of the people who live within them and the
harmonious and just balancing of town and country. In
21st Century Garden Cities
of Tomorrow: a Manifesto
, Philip Ross and Yves Cabannes, Professor of Urban
Planning, have identified twelve principles or doorways to creating a 'Garden City'
which for Cabannes can include any town, city or neighbourhood (Ross and Cabannes,
2013). These principles include common ownership of the 'city', carbon neutral,
urban agriculture, participatory budgeting, egailitarianism, participatory design and
citizen rights for all. While Mayor of Letchworth, Ross developed and implemented
many of his ideas and since then he has attracted growing interest from NGOs,
think tanks and political parties in the UK, China and the US. As Pindar (2005)
concludes in his
Visions of the City
, utopian visions of future cities should not be
so easily dismissed as authoritarian and irrelevant distractions or fantasies, for it is
possible to learn a great deal if we allow them to effectively challenge the conditions
and contradictions of the present. A number of contemporary ecological visions,
ecovillage experiments, design scenarios and actually existing developments continue
to demonstrate how the future could work (Manzini and Jegou, 2003; Beatley, 2004;
Downton, 2009; Girardet, 2010, 2012), and major international exhibitions such as
'Future city: Experiment and utopia and architecture 1956-2006' demonstrate the
excitement as well as the need for continual exploration, conceptual creativity in
project design that transcends disciplinary boundaries (Alison
et al
., 2006).
American architect Frank Lloyd Wright conceived of human settlements where
each domestic unit or homestead would have plots of between one and five acres,
with at least one acre for tillage. He rejected the big city, finance capital and
landlordism. His Broadacre City was an attempt to realize in imagination and practice
the reconnection of people with the land by merging town and country. He advocated
a form of living influenced by the
transcendentalism
of Whitman, Emerson and
Thoreau, with a Jeffersonian notion of democracy. He believed in a trenchant
individualism, currently evading people in the densely inhabited and polluted cities
like that 'fibrous tumour' he called New York. Modern communications, particularly
the automobile and telephones, would make the Broadacre concept possible, over-
coming limitations of space and place. For Wright (1958), new building materials
and techniques made the verticality of the city 'unscientific' and unnecessary. However,
his 'Usonian' vision, powerful in itself, was realized in another form that would not
have won his wholehearted approval, even though Wright was one of the first
architects to design houses with integral garage space - a post-war suburban sprawl,
a numbing automobile culture that arguably inhibits the development of community
social relationships, degrading the natural environment with tract housing, billboards,
