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Reinterpreting the Garden City Concept
Robert FreestoneFaculty of the Built EnvironmentUniversity of New South Wales
Sydney, Australia
CHINESE PLANNING NETWORK, BEIJING, JUNE 2006
The Master Key
Town-Country Magnet
The Social City
Correct principle of a city’s growth
Raymond Unwin’s adaptation of the garden city model
Moscow, Wroclaw, London
Letchworth, Welwyn
Greenbelt towns, US
New towns, UK
Garden suburbs of the world
Town Country magnet for today
Hall and Ward (1998)
Some arguments for new communities
• reduces pressures for piecemeal development • provides cost-effective investment in infrastructure• provides a more economical use of land • minimises the environmental impacts of urban growth• provides a high quality of design and layout• provides opportunities for balanced housing and
employment growth• ensures continuity of supply of development land• provides opportunities for creating socially mixed
communities
Pacione (2004)
Popular ‘garden towns’
in China
Xiangfan
Suzhou
Chinese city history
(Wu, 2003)
Nanjing Garden Suburb, 1930s
Shanghai satellite towns, 1960s
Beijing Riviera development, 2000s
Zhenjiang’s Nanxu New Town project
Songjiang ‘Garden City’, Shanghai
Dongton eco city, Shanghai
Garden city values for Asia• Sustainablility
• Greenness • Organicism
• Compactness• Coexistence with rural environments
• Diversity• Continuity
• Community development• Social tenure • Social justice • Civic space• Flexibility
• Design guidelines• Co-partnerships
• Holism
Constraints and challenges
• Urban growth far outstripping urban changes wrought by the industrial revolution
• Urbanisation of the countryside via extended metropolitan region
• The emergence of the global city • Concerns about the availability of building
land
Constraints to sustainable community planning
(Campbell, 1996)
Flexible space: not a blueprint
The future?
Think what it would mean at the start of the 21st century, not just in Howard’s England but still more in nations grappling with city-building worldwide, if they could somehow appropriate and build on the qualities Howard so brilliantly brought to the task: a utopian vision of an altogether better way of living together in cities, coupled with the practical common sense that would make it achievable. Perhaps the real legacy of [Howard] is to tell us that if we think that way, combining breadth of vision with hard practicality on mundane details, we can truly build an urban world almost beyond our present imaginations.
(Hall, Hardy and Ward, 2003)