Sir Ebenezer Howard

Sir Ebenezer Howard (born Jan. 29, 1850, London, Eng.—died May 1, 1928, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire) was the founder of the English garden-city movement, which influenced urban planning throughout the world.

After starting work in a stockbroker’s office at age 15, Howard learned shorthand and held various jobs as a private secretary and stenographer before becoming a shorthand reporter in the London law courts. He was a liberal social reformer who was decisively influenced by Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward (1889).

In the 1880s Howard wrote To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Social Reform. Not published until 1898, this work was reissued in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow. In this book he proposed the founding of “garden cities,” each a self-sufficient entity—not a dormitory suburb—of 30,000 population, and each ringed by an agricultural belt unavailable to builders. Howard was attempting to reverse the large-scale migration of people from rural areas and small towns to cities, which were becoming overpopulated. Howard’s garden cities were intended to provide heretofore rural districts with the economic opportunities and the amenities of large industrial cities. Each garden city would be owned by a private corporation.

Howard had the gift of persuading practical businessmen that his idea was financially sound and socially desirable. During his lifetime two garden cities were founded, both in Hertfordshire: Letchworth (1903) and Welwyn Garden City (1920). They served as prototypes of the new towns organized by the British government after World War II. These later towns differed from Howard’s model in that a contiguous zone of farmland was not an essential feature. Howard was knighted in 1927.