The Art of Building a Garden City

LEARNING

FROM THE PAST

One of the striking features of the debate about British planning

and place-making has been the headlong decline in the quality and

ambition of the arguments over the last 40 years. Many of the key

successes of the garden city movement – and particularly its British

successor, the new towns programme – have now been mythologised

into failures. In an attempt to undo this confusion, Part 1 looks at the

history and development of these communities, demonstrating that

the past is in fact a repository of rich and radical learning that is still

refreshingly creative and relevant today.