I read with great interest the various contributions in G2 (5 January) on garden cities, towns or villages of tomorrow. The plea in the first article, by Owen Hatherley, was for a new town that “doesn’t look planned by developers but for the public good”. This is what I found in the new town I have lived in for almost 60 years. When I moved to Crawley in 1957 it was to a new town designated 10 years earlier which was growing rapidly. The main characteristic of such new towns of this first postwar generation was planning on the neighbourhood principle. Each neighbourhood was built for a population of about 8,000 to 10,000, the catchment area for a local primary school, doctors and dentist surgeries, pub, church, a small row of shops, a small community centre (initially a wooden hut).
This, I believe, is still viable in our digital and car-centred age. Community is built from parents meeting at the school gates (another principle was that no child under 11 needs to cross a main road to get to school) in the doctor’s surgery and at the local shops. These contacts can build a sense of community, as I witness daily from my kitchen window which looks out on a primary school.
When the new towns were designated in the 1940s we were a country that was almost bankrupt after an expensive war and the withdrawal of aid from the US. Surely it is not beyond us to do something similar to meet the crisis in housing that exists today?
Gillian Pitt
Crawley, West Sussex
• Citing the great urbanist Jane Jacobs as an inspiration for new settlements is well wide of the mark. She regarded the garden city brigade as having “city-destroying ideals” and dismissed both them and the modern movement as “decentrists”. So where should we start with “the necessary acreage and a serviceable budget”? By tackling existing cities, especially those with economic problems, and making them better.
You’re right, of course, that a key garden city concept was vast acres of pointless roadside landscaping, ecologically worthless and highly wasteful of scarce building land. We can make far better use of it with modest increases in density, as our Victorian forebears taught us. Squandering scarce farmland on outmoded garden suburb dreams is destructive as well as pointless. The ultra-low densities of the garden city movement left us fatally dependent on cars, with high greenhouse gas emissions an inevitable follow-on. The bullet we need to bite is not building destructive new settlements but moving economic activity to where the people are, in sustainable, compact towns and cities.
Jon Reeds
Smart Growth UK
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