ABSTRACT
The delay in the recognition and acceptance of the individuals’ early visionary ideas is very important. Reprinted several times since, it remains astonishingly topical and relevant to many modern urban problems. In Ebenezer Howard’s original theoretical diagram of his garden city, published in 1898, he divided the town up into ‘wards’ of about 5,000 people, each of which would contain local shops, schools and other services. In the United States, however, the idea was taken much further during the preparation of the New York Regional Plan in the 1920s. Abercrombie’s most notable contributions to Anglo-American planning theory and practice, however, were made in extending city planning to a wider scale. Planning as a tradition in Europe goes back to the Ancient Greeks. The garden city was soon exported across the Channel. But curiously, in France its best-known expression seems to have occurred spontaneously, at about the same time that Howard was writing, without any mutual interaction.
