ABSTRACT
After World War II, Europe began to reconstruct its major cities around the notions of what were variously described as new towns and satellite cities. In France, the first important interpretations of Howard's ideas, Georges Benoit-Levy's Le Cite Jardin, confused garden city and garden suburb, a problem that would prove endemic. In the 1920s and 1930s Henri Sellier, who had learned from Unwin and Parker in Hampstead Garden City, planned and built a series of planned garden suburbs with low-rent workers' housing in the zone around Paris. The Germans were even more faithful, forming their own German equivalent of the Garden City Association; as their leader Hans Kampffmeyer said in 1908, they wanted a German Letchworth. Part of the huge garden suburb satellite built in the 1920s next to their factory in West Berlin, with neighbourhoods designed by leading Weimar-period architects. The conclusion is clear: very consistently, mainland Europe either failed to understand Howard's argument, or wilfully misinterpreted it.
