Ebenezer Howard

Ebenezer Howard was born in 1850 in inner London. Once he was old enough he was sent away to school and moved around various rural schools until he finished schooling at age 15. Once he was out of school Howard learned shorthand and worked at the ‘City temple’, transcribing sermons.  At age twenty he moved to America and fell into a job as a stenographer in Chicago. During this time he watched the rebuilding and re-planning of much of Chicago’s business district after the ‘Great fire’, which burnt down most of the CBD in 1871. It is believed Howard took the term ‘garden city’ from this time, as “Chicago called itself the ‘Garden City’” (Bayley 1975, pg. 24) of the mid-west. He kept his job in America for a few years until he moved back to England and took a job assisting to produce parliamentary reports. (A job he held for the rest of his life). So an unusual aspect of this is that Howard never studied planning or design and had a limited amount of education.

Although Howard had a lack of formal education, he read a lot and was constantly thinking and writing about political and social issues. In what Howard called “A unique combination of proposals”, he compiled many of these thoughts into a book, ‘To-morrow: A peaceful path to real reform’ (1898).  This in 1902 was renamed as the now definitive version, ‘Garden cities of To-morrow’. It is basically this book and concept alone that made Howard famous in the area of planning.

Howard’s chief concern and a prominent social issue at the time was the immense influx of people into the cities. Howard wrote, “It is deeply to be deplored that the people should continue to stream into the already over-crowded cities, and should thus further deplete the country districts” (Howard 1898, pg. 4). Over the page, in a concise summary of what is essentially Howard’s own message, Mr. B. Tillett (A unionist leader) is quoted saying “hands are hungry for toil, and the lands are starving for labour”. He was referring to the vast unemployed who could not find an opening in the already stocked labour force. The reason for people flocking to the cities was due to the recent industrialization of urban England. Industrial jobs which had emerged in the cities were seen to pay more and it was believed by many that there were better prospects for work and more social attractions in the city (Which was very often not correct).

“Howard was interested principally in social reform and, in particular, changes in law relating to land tenure”(Bayley 1975, pg. 25). The changes he is specifically referring to is that Howard’s plan suggested that land should be owned by the city, not by private landlords, a design that would theoretically keep rates and rents lower. The residents would naturally still have to pay rent, but in Howard’s words it would be “paid into the coffers of Garden City” (Howard 1898, pg. 21). It would then be used to pay back the principal and interest on the money with which the new town’s land was bought with, to maintain town assets and also as a fund for the sick/elderly pensions etc.

 According to Fishman (1977, pg. 6) “He wanted to build wholly new cities in the midst of unspoiled countryside on land which would remain the property of the community as a whole”. As for social reform; he stressed the need to stop population flow into the already overcrowded and sprawling cities and the need to get people back to the land. He believed the cities to be a “magnet”, drawing people in with the belief of higher wages and employment opportunities and “prospects of advancement”, or the chance to improve one’s financial standing. Howard sought to disperse this belief.