Ebenezer Howard

Howard framed his proposal as a problem of three magnets: the town offers work and isolates; the country offers air and does not feed you; the town-country was to offer both. Out of that came the garden city: limited population, an inviolable green belt and land held in community ownership.

That last point, the one almost always forgotten, was the central one: the increase in land value returned to the community that generated it. Letchworth and Welwyn put it into practice; the rest of the world copied the appearance — low houses with gardens — and discarded the land ownership, producing exactly the suburb Howard did not want.

A parliamentary stenographer with no training in architecture or planning, born in London in 1850 and dead in 1928, Howard lived for some years in the United States, read the social reformers of his time and in 1898 published a pamphlet reissued in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow. His diagram of the three magnets, town, country and town-country, proposed communities of about thirty thousand people, surrounded by an agricultural belt, with land in collective ownership so that rising values would finance services instead of enriching landowners.

It did not stay on paper: he founded the Garden City Association in 1899 and promoted Letchworth (1903) and Welwyn (1920), the first two garden cities, designed by Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker. His idea inspired Britain's postwar new towns and garden suburbs across half the world, though almost always without the collective land ownership that was its economic core. Jane Jacobs accused him of hating the city; advocates of land value capture claim him as a precursor.