Ebenezer Howard

Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) was a British writer who developed and popularised the idea of the Garden City, and was a huge influence on town planners in the western world for most of the twentieth century.

Howard emigrated to the [[United States in 1871, living in Nebraska and Chicago, but returned to London in 1876, working as a clerk and sometime Parliamentary reporter. He became a supporter of Henry George, whose single tax proposals were to influence Howard's work. In 1898 Howard published To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, republished under its more familiar title Garden Cities of To-Morrow in 1902. In it, he argued that the problems of ever-expanding cities, and the poor social conditions within them, could be solved by instead building self-contained networks of 'Garden Cities' which would be restricted in size, would be designed to maximise the social, intellectual and economic potential of a community, and would offer the advantages of living in town and in the country in terms of cultural, educational, recreational and environmental amenities.

Howard's model saw urban refugees building up a city until it reached a population of 32,000, wherupon a new city would be started nearby. Ultimately, Howard saw the creation of a network of such cities: six such surrounding a slightly larger city of 58,000, the settlements divided by green belt land and linked by high speed urban railways. His economic system drew on George: land would be municipally-owned, and revenue derived from the increasing value of this land as the cities developed would be used to provide public services, even old age pensions; the need for individuals to pay municipal rates would dwindle and disappear.