The Garden-City, urbanity revisited

Abstract

This essay, making use of comparative references to the Ville Radieuse and to the contemporary urban agglomerations, deffends the urbanity of the Garden-City and points out, as it happens in Howard's proposal in contrast to the other two cases, that the protagonist of the Urbanistic is the political man (zoon politikon), the citizen understood as a crossroad of the economical man and the social actor, in the spatial dimension which is carachteristic to him: The Garden-City, a Compatible State of Emergency.
This interpretation leads the author to think about the relationships between Howard's work with some of the issues linked to the building of the modern masses society and which are projected from the very beginning of the social sciences, the nineteenth century social thoughts (utopic socialists, Bellamy, Marshall, Kropotkin, Morris).
Finally, the author speaks about the distances between the theory of the Garden- City and its pretended subsequent materialization, specially in the construction of The Garden-Suburbs and the British development of The New Towns.