Page 35 - History 2020
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Garden City concept. Tristram Hunt sums up: Howard’s Garden City “did not create a
new way of living, a path to real reform, free from city, country, or suburb. Instead it
opened the floodgates for a new breed of suburbia which came to swamp interwar
Britain.”
Howard’s concept: town, country and “Town-Country”
Could it have worked? As noted above, the problem wasn’t lack of detail; rather, too
much. Howard’s model wasn’t elaborate for the sake of it. But it exposed a fatal
weakness in Howards’ approach. In systems analysis terms, there were too many
variables. Every deviation potentially threw everything further off course. And some
of the deviations Howard faced in Letchworth were pretty gross ones. Howard’s
th
failure arguably endorses those who criticised the 18 century Enlightenment for its
over-reliance on reason, another demonstration that in human affairs, even the most
brilliant rational planning has its limitations. Either way, town and country remained
