Garden Cities

Ebenezer Howard, in contrast to other early-nineteenth-century planners of ideal societies, proposed a garden city that did not remain just a theoretical vision. Howard's concept became a widely disseminated practical contribution to twentieth-century urban planning and represents one of the most influential ideas in the profession. His ideas, in one version or another, spread quickly throughout Britain, giving rise to actual social and physical experiments. Howard's concepts also influenced other European countries and the United States. Although garden city historiography is highly Eurocentric, the extra-European history of garden city developments is treated in this entry too, with a balance between the well-researched histories of the Global Northwest and their less researched Global Southeastern counterparts.