Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
However it had carefully selected residents from the supportive middle class and
from loyal factory workers, excluding those with radical views, and, like most so-
called Garden 'City' projects, was really a suburban addition, not a new town. But
as was shown in Chap. 2 Howard was not simply advocating what today would
be called a green agenda, there were social and economic reasons behind the new
form. Unfortunately, when the Garden City concept was applied to other towns it
frequently degenerated into what amounted to the creation of garden suburbs, low
density areas with more green space simply added on to existing areas, and usually
without many services. What was also forgotten about Howard's plans was the key
social concept behind the ideas, namely that groups of people got together with
architects to plan their own town, incorporating community facilities for a better
co-operative social life, and was progressive in encouraging recreational and edu-
cational classes of self-improvement.
Howard's ideas of community co-operation and the need for planned commu-
nity facilities were, however, fundamental to the development of the Neighbour-
hood Planning approach in the 1920s, pioneered by Perry ( 1929 ) and later modi-
fied by Stein ( 1951 ) and the British new towns of the post-war period. For Perry,
new suburban areas should be developed under an overall plan, with a park in the
centre, shops on the main roads outside, with the unit being big enough to service
a neighbourhood school. In addition, houses were provided with gardens, used for
recreation or for gardening, as in Howard's scheme. But after World War II, greater
affluence and the demand for bigger houses—and hence lot sizes—as well as the in-
creasing use of the car and the resultant need for garages and wider roads, modified
the neighbourhood approach in which inhabitants could walk to the local facilities.
Cities kept on adding these planned units to the edge of urban areas, creating what
amounted to a planned sprawl. Together with the addition of new high-speed four
lane highways, they contributed to the increasing sprawl of cities, while develop-
ments on larger lots outside the city led to even lower density, residential-only areas
that could only be served by cars . The restriction of commercial and other services
in these neighbourhood unit areas led to the development of highway-orientated
ribbons and shopping centres to serve the auto-dependent suburbs, which meant
that even the facilities provided in the neighbourhood units could not attract suffi-
cient threshold population from the local area to compete with these developments,
which led to the decline of many of their local shops.
An alternative to the developing urban sprawl of the twentieth century was pro-
posed by Le Corbusier ( 1929 ), with his advocacy of cities composed of high rise
towers. Although much maligned because of the disasters of so many public sector
high rises that were built after World War II (Coleman 1985 ), Le Corbusier ought to
be recognized for suggesting that his tower blocks should contain many social fea-
tures, such as community facilities, shops, schools and security. In environmental
terms he emphasized that the towers should be set in a park setting so nature could
be enjoyed, not jammed together, as well as stressing the importance of light in the
apartments, with many windows and balconies at both sides of the tower blocks to
catch the morning and evening sun. Most would agree that Le Corbusier over-stated
the case for both high density and the too-uniform modernist styles of stark concrete
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