ABSTRACT
If Ebenezer Howard can claim the mantle of a prophet, it is through his perception that the triumphant industrial metropolis of his time represented a temporary phenomenon, and that the real trend of the twentieth century would be a radical decentralization of people and industry away from the urban cores. Garden Cities of To-morrow must be put in the context of a diverse group of decentralist/regionalist thinkers from the turn of the century, including Alfred Marshall, William Morris, Patrick Geddes, Peter Kropotkin, and H.G. Wells (Fishman, 1977, pp. 23–64). Howard was perhaps the least sophisticated intellectually of this group, but he alone was able to join decentralist theory to a vision of a new community — the garden city — that was both easily comprehensible and had deep roots in Anglo-American culture. The garden city tradition thus had from its origins two distinct elements: (1) decentralization, the idea, as Howard put it in 1904, that the twentieth century would be the age of the ‘great exodus’ from the ‘closely-compacted, over-crowded, city’ (Howard, 1904); and (2) community, the idea that the blind but powerful forces of decentralization could and should be channelled to form self-contained communities where work, residence and leisure facilities would be found in close proximity.
