[Urbanstudy] The Machine is a Garden By Amanda Kolson Hurle

[Vinay Baindur]

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/26/the_machine_is_a_garden_cities_britain_china

The Machine is a Garden

In 1898, an unassuming British stenographer hatched the idea of "garden
cities" as an antidote to dirty, crowded London. Today, a revival of that
idea is spreading from the U.K. to China to India -- and some people think
it just might help save the planet.

By Amanda Kolson Hurley
Illustration by Timothy J. Reynolds

On 71st Avenue, just south of Queens Boulevard, in Forest Hills, New York,
there’s a small shopping strip that looks like countless others in American
cities. Banks, shoe stores, and delis sit side by side, recalling a time
not so long ago when going shopping meant more than a trip to Target. But
keep heading south, crossing under an elevated railway
<https://www.google.com/maps/@40.719948,-73.844928,3a,75y,214.5h,89.81t/data=%213m4%211e1%213m2%211soqQFXneZQFoNo-6wFPPBdQ%212e0>,
and it feels like entering a different kind of time warp: Abruptly, asphalt
becomes brick and spills into a broad, sunny square
<https://www.google.com/maps/@40.719272,-73.845343,3a,90y,162.9h,90.07t/data=%213m4%211e1%213m2%211sZKyAsDZGovf-_Ki5_rMH4Q%212e0%216m1%211e1>.
Red-tiled, half-timbered buildings suggest an Italian piazza by way of
medieval England. Shady sidewalks curve away from the square. The only
reminder that it's the 21st century, and that this is New York, is the
rumble of a train on the Long Island Rail Road overhead.

This sense of being in a city, but not of it, is precisely what the
designers of Forest Hills Gardens intended. In 1909, after buying 142 acres
of open land, the Russell Sage Foundation hired architect Grosvenor
Atterbury and landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. -- son of
Central Park's famous creator -- to build a model suburb. It was to be an
example of the new developments that the explosion of railroads and
streetcars were producing, a place that combined the best of town and
country. For inspiration, Atterbury and Olmsted looked to a new trend in
England said to offer just this kind of mix: garden cities.

The concept of the garden city was devised by 19th-century social reformers
to offer everything big cities didn't: a limited number of residents with
ownership over their community's land; spacious, well-built homes for
people of diverse means; clean air and ample green space; and centers of
employment, education, and culture that could easily be reached on foot.
Its slightly younger sister, the garden suburb, took the garden city's
basic features -- residential streets gracefully enfolding a central avenue
or green -- and transplanted them to the outskirts of urban centers. The
idea caught on across England and in numerous other countries; after Forest
Hills Gardens, for instance, came the chic neighborhood of Jardim América
in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1913, and Denenchofu, a Tokyo suburb, seven years
later.

After a few decades in the limelight, garden cities fell out of fashion.
But recently, they've been making a comeback. A small but growing number of
architects, urban planners, and policymakers are holding up garden cities
as potential antidotes to everything that ails the modern city, from
substandard housing to environmental degradation to the segregation of rich
and poor.

Among these proponents is Robert Stern. In December 2013, Stern, the dean
of the Yale School of Architecture, and two co-authors released a book
called *Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City*
<http://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Planned-Garden-Suburb-Modern/dp/1580933262/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407260705&sr=1-1&keywords=Paradise+Planned%3A+The+Garden+Suburb+and+the+Modern+City>.
At 12 pounds and some 1,000 pages, the book is bursting with photographs,
drawings, and plans that chronicle the long tradition of the garden city
and suburb, including Forest Hills Gardens. Yet the book is not just a
history, the trio writes: It offers "a development model for the present
and foreseeable future."

The stakes of finding such a model to guide urbanization are high. By 2030,
1 billion people (nearly one out of every eight on the planet) will live in
Chinese cities, and Indian cities will swell with about 200 million new
residents
<http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/urbanization/indias_urbanization_a_closer_look>.
Meanwhile, the specter of climate change hovers over all cities, which
account for up to 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and are especially
vulnerable to air pollution, heat waves, and wind and flooding brought by
storms.

Ebenezer Howard and a diagram of garden cities from Howard's 1898 book
*To-morrow:
A Peaceful Path to Real Reform*.

Could garden cities help fix these problems? Advocates think so. They argue
that garden cities can deliver the humane, sustainable, equitable
communities that people want and the planet needs, by slashing emissions,
preserving green space, and encouraging neighborly interaction.

Today, garden-city projects are popping up from England to India to
Cambodia. In particular, China, where construction rates have exploded
since the early 2000s, has become a petri dish for garden cities. Among
several planned communities is Heart of Lake
<http://www.ramsa.com/en/projects-search/planning/heart-of-lake.html>,
designed by Stern's firm and currently being built on an island in Xiamen.
"We are being asked to do interpretations of it in other Chinese cities,"
Stern says.

But many, if not most, of these new garden cities and suburbs will look
nothing like Forest Hills Gardens. They will be bigger, taller, and denser.
Heart of Lake, for instance, will pack 2 million square feet of
construction into a mere 25 acres and include high-rise apartments. It's
also unclear that these projects will adhere to core garden-city values,
including community ownership and the mixing of social classes. What's
more, there is little data to prove definitively that garden cities are in
fact the right solution for urban ills; firm figures on their
environmental, social, and other impacts are hard to come by when no two
projects look alike.

In short, the garden city of the 21st century is a slippery concept. Stern
says that, in China, getting the government to embrace a new urban form is
"like turning a gigantic ocean liner around." But the real question, it
seems, no matter the country, is whether a turn toward garden cities would
truly be worthwhile.

In 1898, an unassuming London stenographer named Ebenezer Howard borrowed
50 British pounds to print a short book titled *To-morrow: A Peaceful Path
to Real Reform*. In the book, Howard laid out a plan to arrest the flow of
people into great manufacturing centers such as London, whose squalid,
disease-ridden slums repelled him. "It is deeply to be deplored," he wrote
<http://books.google.com/books?id=vrcODC5FLtEC&lpg=PP1&dq=%22To-morrow%3A%20A%20Peaceful%20Path%20to%20Real%20Reform%22&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q=%22It%20is%20deeply%20to%20be%20deplored%22&f=false>,
"that the people should continue to stream into the already over-crowded
cities, and should thus further deplete the country districts."

Enter the garden city. Drawing on the political thought of American
economist Henry George, who believed the value of land should be common
property, Howard described a planned community outside a major city that
would combine the social and financial opportunities of the city with the
"natural healthfulness" of the countryside. In a handful of simple,
concentric-circle diagrams, Howard drew a city that would be home to 32,000
people who would enjoy fresh air, green space, and places to shop and
relax. The city would be largely self-contained, with homes, schools, and
factories encircled by an agricultural estate.

Howard proposed that a community trust, backed by investors, would buy the
land for such a city. Rents collected would fund public improvements and
services but would also go toward residents' gradual purchase of the land.
Howard was adamant that this be the case, so that the community could
benefit from increases in land value -- a principle known as "land value
capture."

Howard had no formal education past the age of 14 and was a classic
Victorian tinkerer, but his powers of persuasion were remarkable. By 1903,
he had won enough supporters to establish Letchworth Garden City
<http://www.letchworthgc.com/>, about 30 miles north of London. Welwyn
Garden City would follow years later. Letchworth became the Berkeley of its
day, with middle-class progressives moving into its cozy streets. It also
attracted industry, which Howard wanted, knowing that a garden city had to
provide viable alternatives to work in London.

The idea soon inspired a spinoff. A few years after Letchworth's birth, a
philanthropist named Henrietta Barnett hired that city's architects to
design London's Hampstead Garden Suburb. The new project shared garden-city
ideals, except for self-containment. The garden suburb, as it became known,
proved particularly well suited to private development, and the idea spread
to the United States, Mexico, Australia, Japan, Egypt, France, and Germany.

There were problems, however. It wasn't always easy to get motivated groups
of backers to establish true garden cities. Moreover, in practice, some
ideals were never reached. Howard aimed to provide the poor with quality
housing, but Letchworth's workers' cottages proved too expensive for many.
And the city's industry, centered on a corset factory, could never really
compete with London's draw. Over time, Letchworth was pulled into the
capital's orbit; today it is home to about as many people as Howard
intended, and property values are high (though about half the housing has
been made affordable through mechanisms such as reduced rent).

Garden cities and suburbs faded from the scene in the mid-20th century, as
Le Corbusier-inspired "towers in the park" came into vogue in the United
Kingdom and elsewhere, resulting in a wave of mega-scaled housing projects.
It was the age of the automobile too, and compact suburbs became obsolete,
while sprawling subdivisions multiplied. More recently, however, sprawl
became seen as a menace for, among other things, encouraging people to spew
carbon by shuttling around in cars. Tower blocks also fell out of favor,
criticized for creating social isolation and breeding crime.

Today, as remedies, some government officials and urban planners in the
United Kingdom are resuscitating the idea of garden cities. They see it as
an attractive way to deploy green technologies, such as high-performance
buildings and clean mass transit, while addressing the country's housing
shortage. (In England, between 2001 and 2011, 1.4 million homes were built,
while the country's population increased by almost 4 million.)

This year, the United Kingdom's Wolfson Economics Prize
<http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/wolfsonprize> awarded £250,000 to the
entrant with the best proposal for a "new Garden City which is visionary,
economically viable, and popular." Five finalists were selected from 279
entries; One uses financial modeling to show how a small garden city would
be feasible; another proposes doubling the size of an existing urban locale
along garden-city lines.

In April, British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg announced that the
government would accept bids to construct up to three new garden cities.
"[W]e need to create planned communities: whole new towns with the
infrastructure and amenities they need, communities where people genuinely
want to live, and built where demand is high," Clegg wrote
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/nick-clegg/10580862/Nick-Clegg-Garden-cities-are-the-answer-to-a-housing-problem-we-cant-ignore-any-more.html>
in the *Daily Telegraph* in January. The garden cities will have at least
15,000 homes each. Their sites have not yet been chosen, but they will
likely be in southeastern England. Separately, the government has said it
wants to build another garden city at Ebbsfleet, in Kent.

Some critics argue that the fuss around garden cities obscures the real
problem: the scarcity of housing in and around London, the European Union's
most populous metropolitan area. Urban redevelopment would accomplish more
than building new garden cities ever could, according to Alexandra Jones of
the nonprofit group Centre for Cities. "You might not have objections to a
garden city in the middle of nowhere, but you might not have demand to live
there either," she wrote
<http://www.planningresource.co.uk/article/1300638/garden-cities-not-panacea-alexandra-jones>
in June on the website Planning Resource, calling garden cities "the
flavour of the month." Critics also take issue with the relatively low
density of the garden-city model, saying it will consume too many resources
and actually promote car use by spreading out development.

The government is determined to reassure citizens of garden cities'
benefits and may even offer people tax breaks to accept construction near
their homes. Still, local opposition and bureaucratic red tape could stymie
development for some time. Meanwhile, Howard's big idea has already found
new life in other corners of the globe, including China. It's here,
however, that the promise and potential pitfalls of the garden city's
renaissance are most glaringly juxtaposed.

The cover of *Paradise Planned*, co-authored by Robert Stern, and an aerial
photo of Jardim America -- a community planned around the garden-city
concept -- on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Garden cities may take root in China widely for a number of reasons -- not
least among them the rapid growth of cities that are a step down in size
from the likes of Beijing and Shanghai. The government's new urbanization
plan, released in March, seeks to route rural migrants away from
"extra-large" cities and toward smaller ones. Whereas cities expanded
spatially in the 1990s and 2000s, "what we will see going forward is a
reversal," says Jonathan Woetzel, a McKinsey analyst in the country. "China
will move toward a denser model," with more hub cities and satellite towns,
connected by railway and highway infrastructure.

The cities of Chengdu and Chongqing
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/16/chicago_on_the_yangtze>
in southwestern China have been designated as special testing zones for
urban-rural integration strategies. And, perhaps noting similarities
between the country's urbanization goals and Howard's vision for
turn-of-the-century England, local leaders are looking to garden cities for
guidance. Chengdu officials traveled to London in November 2013 to meet
with the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA), the latter-day
incarnation of the Garden City Association, founded by Howard in 1899. They
also toured Letchworth.

Meanwhile, private developers are already putting the garden-city concept
into practice. On the outskirts of Chengdu, development parcels are being
sold for Tianfu Ecological City, designed by the Chicago firm Adrian Smith
+ Gordon Gill Architecture (better known for its towers in Dubai and Abu
Dhabi) and funded by Beijing Vantone Citylogic Investment Corp., a real
estate company focused on sustainable urban development. Howard said a
garden city should occupy about one-sixth of the property in an overall
project; most of the area should be devoted to green space. Likewise,
structures in Tianfu will take up one-seventh of its whole site, Gill said,
and a "buffer landscape
<http://smithgill.com/media/pdfs/Tianfu_Ecological_City_for_web_3.pdf>"
will surround them to conserve farmland and prevent sprawl. Tianfu's master
plan even has the telltale concentric pattern of Howard's diagrams, with a
green zone at its heart.

Similar projects are spreading. Wei Yang, a Chinese-British urban designer
whose firm specializes in garden-city plans and was a Wolfson Economics
Prize finalist, recently won a commission to coordinate garden-city
planning in Jiangsu province, and her firm has created two master plans for
Hunan province. (Yang has also been detailed by the British government to
advise China's Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development on
sustainable urbanization.) Other garden-city-inspired projects include
Heart of Lake and Gai Lan Creek in Chongqing, both designed by Stern's
firm, and Yuelai Eco-City in northern Chongqing, planned by the California
firm Calthorpe Associates.

But just how closely will these ventures follow Howard's guidelines, set
more than a century ago? Not very, by early indications -- raising the
obvious question of whether the projects can even be called garden cities.

Take the issue of density. Once full, Tianfu will pack 80,000 people into a
thicket of apartment buildings. That's more than twice as many inhabitants
as Howard imagined in a location one-third the size. Additionally, Tianfu
won't have a separate zone for industry. Rather, apartments will sit next
to, and even on top of, offices and shops -- a mixed-use model becoming
more common in China.

Then there is the matter of residential control of land. Chinese land is
government-owned, and Yang explains that local authorities typically buy
farmers out of their leases in order to build new towns and cities. This is
often done with lump sums of cash. If garden-city projects did something
different -- for instance, set up trusts for long-term management, with
residents as stakeholders -- it would be a "policy breakthrough," Yang
says, helping foster a fresh spirit of community engagement among new
arrivals to China's urban communities. But local governments would have to
accept the idea of trusts, which is anything but guaranteed.

An additional tripping point is socioeconomic balance. The plans for Tianfu
call for integrated affordable housing, a rarity in China, where low-income
housing is usually isolated from other habitations. But Gordon Gill, one of
Tianfu's main designers, admits there is nothing to hold the developer to
that goal. (After all, the developer is, like any other, eager to make a
lot of money.)

On top of everything, there are common failures in Chinese urban planning
to which garden cities could fall victim. Buildings are often constructed
at warp speed, and designs aren't always followed closely, leading to
shoddy end products. Moreover, China's famous "ghost cities
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/21/photos_ghost_city_chenggong_china>"
testify to the folly of assuming that if you build it, they will come.
Without nearby jobs, Woetzel says, new cities will have a hard time
attracting newcomers, even among the up-and-coming middle class.

Certainly, China isn't alone in posing problems that could undermine garden
cities as they were intended to be. Two thousand miles away from Chengdu,
in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, residents have moved into the first phase
of Godrej Garden City
<https://www.godrejproperties.com/godrejgardencity/overview>, which will
house 5,000 people and feature bike lanes, parks, and rapid mass transit.
Here "garden city" is partly a marketing moniker: Residents won't own the
land, and the target buyers are middle- and upper-middle-class people who
may own more than one car. (The project manager emphasizes, however, that
hundreds of units are planned for lower-income residents.)

Back in the United Kingdom, Clegg's prospectus
<https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCwQFjAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gov.uk%2Fgovernment%2Fuploads%2Fsystem%2Fuploads%2Fattachment_data%2Ffile%2F303324%2F20140414_Locally-led_Garden_Cities_final_signed.pdf&ei=nDDhU5mIJs6_uATeioL4DQ&usg=AFQjCNGE8LSl20tp1m59vRUTXkC-JL9vWw&bvm=bv.72197243,d.c2E>
for new garden cities mentions TCPA principles, which are rooted in
Howard's 1898 treatise, but it doesn't make them binding. "The Government
does not wish to impose any definition of what Garden Cities are, but
instead intends to work with localities to support them in developing and
delivering their own vision," the prospectus reads. There are no required
affordable-housing minimums either, though the TCPA has recommended that at
least 60 percent of housing be discounted from market rates.

The risk, ultimately, is that these new projects could wind up lacking the
whole package of qualities meant to set garden cities apart. Some who
support the revival of Howard's idea, however, seem to think this doesn't
much matter -- or at least seem willing to live with compromise.

  Renderings and plans by design architects and master planners Adrian
Smith and Gordon Gill for Tianfu Ecological City, which will be located on
the outskirts of the Chinese city of Chengdu.

It was virtually inevitable that, with the explosion of the global
population, the size and shape of garden cities would change; otherwise,
the concept would likely be wholly disregarded as quaint and impractical.
And there are many ways in which new projects demonstrate Howard's
principles -- perhaps not all of them simultaneously, and perhaps not as
precisely as possible, but still in such a way as to reap important social,
environmental, and other benefits.

"Moving more towards transit, walking, and biking is what has to happen,
but you can't do that without the right urban form. It's a critical pivot
point," says Peter Calthorpe, the principal of Calthorpe Associates. What's
more, he adds, "when you have a superblock of 5,000 units, people don't
know each other. You go to a walkable city block -- 500 units a block --
and all of a sudden you can know your neighbor again."

Indeed, walkability is a Howard-approved feature emphasized in many of
today's garden cities. Walkable neighborhoods have been shown to have higher
social cohesion <http://www.unh.edu/news/cj_nr/2010/dec/bp13capital.cfm>,
lower levels of obesity and diabetes
<http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0085295>,
and lower rates of driving. And China, in particular, is a place where the
feature could do a lot of good. Nearly 140 million passenger cars are on
the road now, and the number could reach 500 million or higher
<http://carnegieendowment.org/files/driving_force.pdf> by 2040. There's an
opportunity, however, to design cars out of new developments, or at least
from residents' day-to-day mobility. Most Chinese still don't have
vehicles, and between 50 and 60 percent of trips in cities are still by
foot or on bicycles. "There's a window, as we think about the planning of
these things, to influence the energy usage per capita," McKinsey's Woetzel
says.

To that end, Heart of Lake will have pedestrian-only streets. Every point
in Tianfu will be reachable within a 15-minute walk, reducing the need for
cars, and a transit center will connect it to Chengdu. (Tianfu's creators
project that the city overall will use 48 percent less energy than a
similar, conventional development and generate 60 percent less carbon
dioxide.)

Similarly, modern science is corroborating Howard's zeal for the
restorative power of green space. A recent study
<http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/46102> estimates that trees prevented about
$7 billion worth of health problems in the United States in 2010 alone, and
researchers in Scotland have found that living near greenery helps close
the "health gap" <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7714950.stm> between
the rich and poor. Today's garden cities generally prioritize green space:
Godrej Garden City, for instance, will have a central park and other small
ones, while 15 percent of the land in Tianfu is reserved for green areas.

To be sure, evidence of garden cities' benefits is oblique, drawn from
studies on particular variables in many urban settings. Recognizing this
deficiency, the TCPA has highlighted the need for focused research on
planned communities. Some critics, meanwhile, are asking why it wouldn't be
better, say, to stitch new parks into existing metropolises, lay bike lanes
down busy avenues, and redevelop vacant sites, rather than build entirely
new locales.

Such piecemeal redevelopment has limitations. It's difficult to coordinate,
for example, and it relies heavily on existing infrastructure, good or bad.
Master planning of new cities, by contrast, can address many needs at once
-- and from a clean slate and for a lot of people. It's no coincidence that
the initial push for garden cities arose in an era when many thousands of
Britons lived in cramped slums for lack of adequate housing, while others
yearned for peace and quiet that London could not provide. Similarly, today
millions of Chinese are seeking places to live and economic opportunity,
while others want a more comfortable, middle-class existence. Garden
cities, proponents point out, allow planners to place large numbers of
these people in places that, from scratch, can concentrate on what has been
shown to make cities both healthy and efficient.

This isn't to say that garden cities and urban renewal should be mutually
exclusive. Rather, they could be part of a two-pronged urban development
strategy, sharing similar features. "The simple answer is that we need
both," Katy Lock, a TCPA advocate, wrote in an email. "The scale of the
crisis means that we can't meet our needs on a plot-by-plot basis alone.… A
new community provides opportunities for holistic planning and the
economies of scale to truly embed the principles of sustainable
development."

George Hoban, a 17-year resident of Forest Hills Gardens, lives on the
central square in a former inn that is now a co-op apartment building. It
is clear from Hoban's description of his neighborhood, offered on an
impromptu tour on a sunny July day, that the place isn't exactly what
Ebenezer Howard had in mind. Property values can top $4 million, and
there's no greenbelt or anchoring industry. Yet Hoban reels off local
attractions that sound familiar: The Long Island Rail Road is on-site; the
subway is two blocks away; young families can get by without a car; and
Hoban lives in an affordable, one-bedroom apartment just a stone's throw
from a mansion.

"If I turn right from my building, I'm in the suburbs. If I turn left, I'm
in the city," Hoban says. When people arrive in the neighborhood for the
first time and admire its aesthetic, he adds, "it gives me a great deal of
pride to live here."

Perhaps a pure garden city, pulled straight from the pages of *To-morrow*,
has never existed and never will. But even when shrunk down from Howard's
utopian ambitions, garden cities still hold the potential to make crucial
contributions to the planet and to people's lives.

Discussing the value and urgency of his work, Gordon Gill mentions *The
Machine in the Garden*
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden> by Leo Marx. The
book wrestles with the tension between technology and the pastoral ideal,
and Gill says it reflects the fact that, for a long time, many people
yearned to escape the machine (the city) for the garden (the country). But
no longer.

"The machine itself," he insists, "has to become a garden."

Amanda Kolson Hurley is a freelance writer specializing in urbanism and was
formerly the executive editor of Architect *magazine*
<http://www.architectmagazine.com/>.

Tianfu images courtesy of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture. Paradise
Planned images courtesy of Monacelli Press. Image of Ebenezer Howard and
diagram of garden cities are public domain via Google Books.
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