Garden Cities of the 21st Century: A Sustainable Path to Suburban Reform

Nicolas Vernet and Anne Coste
Additional contact information
Nicolas Vernet: École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Grenoble (ENSAG), Université Grenoble Alpes, France; French Environment and Energy Management Agency, France
Anne Coste: École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Grenoble (ENSAG), Université Grenoble Alpes, France

Urban Planning, 2017, vol. 2, issue 4, 181-196

Abstract: The garden city is often presented as a low-density, unsustainable and space-consuming archetype of suburbanization (Duany, Roberts, & Tallen, 2014; Hall, 2014; Safdie & Kohn, 1997). It has been deliberately also misused by property developers for gated communities (Le Goix, 2003; Webster, 2001). But these projects have little in common with the original concept of garden cities. We argue that the original garden city, as a theory (Howard, 1898) and as experiments (Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities), is a precedent that can be used in a sustainable approach that addresses a range of issues and concerns, such as housing, governance, the economy, mobility, the community, agriculture, energy and health. The recent Wolfson Economics Prize (2014) and the many new garden cities and suburbs projects currently planned in the UK have demonstrated the resurgence of this model in the planning world, both in terms of theory and practice. In this paper, we explore its potential in the light of environmental challenges. We therefore suggest that as a model, it can in particular underpin the evolution of suburbs in an era of energy transition, since these areas require an ecosystemic rather than sectoral approach to design.

Keywords: density; eco-systemic approach; energy transition; garden cities; model; suburbs; Wolfson Economics Prize (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/1104 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:urbpla:v2:y:2017:i:4:p:181-196

DOI: 10.17645/up.v2i4.1104

Access Statistics for this article

Urban Planning is currently edited by Tiago Cardoso

More articles in Urban Planning from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().