ABSTRACT

At first glance, no two approaches to urban planning in the twentieth century

could seem further apart than those of Le Corbusier and the Garden City

movement: the former favoured large-scale, orthogonal, car-based schemes,

while the latter promoted all things rustic, verdant and small scale. Nonethe-

less, Le Corbusier began his career as an enthusiast for the Garden City move-

ment; its influence, moreover, persisted beyond his early years, and is

detectable in the ideology if not the forms of many of his urban visions. The

Garden City advocates argued that the nineteenth-century industrial city had

left an appalling legacy of disease-ridden, light-starved slum housing, and the

planners of the twentieth century to deal with it. Le Corbusier took the same

ideological starting-point, and proposed a very similar solution: to provide

urban dwellers with a hygienic, humane living environment which combined

the best elements of city and country and which could bring about a much-

needed reconciliation between man and nature. This confluence of concerns

between his work and the Garden City has so far only been lightly touched on

in the secondary literature on Le Corbusier, and not at all in wider discussions

of urban planning and its history.1 Here I seek to redress this imbalance by

tracing the Garden City movement’s influence on Le Corbusier, and by arguing

that we should see the arch-modernist’s urban vision not as a rejection but a

continuation of earlier, more modest schemes. The standard account to be

found in histories of nineteenth-and twentieth-century urbanism puts Le Cor-

busier (and modernist planning more generally) and the Garden City move-

ment into two completely separate camps. Françoise Choay, for instance,

identifies two models for ways of thinking about the city: the ‘progressivist’

and the ‘culturalist’. In the first category she places Robert Owen, Tony

Garnier and Le Corbusier, for their emphasis on functionalism, rationalism and

hygiene, and in the second she locates Ruskin, William Morris, Camillo Sitte

and the Garden City movement, for their concern with the spiritual aspects of

urban life and evocation of nature.2 Le Corbusier was much more than a

straightforward rationalist or functionalist, however: his sense of the potential

of the urban environment to create a richer spiritual life for its inhabitants was

deeply bound up with his emphasis on bringing nature back into the city, as

we will see.