ABSTRACT

Howard summed up his predictions on the evolution of Social Cities, in opening the discussion of a paper by Patrick Geddes, titled ‘Civics as Applied Sociology’, at the London School of Economics in 1904. He observed that ‘while the age we live in is the age of the great closely compacted, overcrowded city, there are already signs, for those who can read them, of a coming change so great and so momentous that the twentieth century will be known as the period of the great exodus’ (reprinted in Meller, 1979). His prediction was correct, although property-owners ensured that inner-city land prices and rents remained artificially inflated. Similarly, he envisaged a ‘greening of the city’, while with a few exceptions, inner-city land has been seen as too precious for use as parks or allotments. But property interests proved more powerful than Howard had supposed, and the mere existence of planning permission can increase a site’s value tenfold.