Ebenezer Howard, one of the most influential names in the field of urban planning of the last century, introduced the "social city" design with Garden City, which tried to build a bridge between the individualist (capitalist) system of his time, unions, cooperatives, nature, quality life, and common ideas.
Ebenezer Howard, British thinker. He influenced contemporary urban design with his ideas on garden cities. Ebenezer Howard has created serious literature with his Garden City Model.
He is also a utopian dreamer and a pragmatic inventor, or, as Lewis Mumford put it, a "practical idealist."
The Life of Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928)
Ebenezer Howard was born in London on January 29, 1850. He was educated first in Suffolk, then at Cheshunt in Hertfordshire, and at Stoke Hall, Ipswich. Howard began serving in the office for a time when he was fifteen years old. He went to the USA in 1871 and started farming in Nebraska. Realizing that he could not do this job in 1872, Ebenezer Howard moved to Chicago and started working as a journalist and court reporter with his expert shorthand knowledge.
Sir Ebenezer Howard (29 January 1850 – 1 May 1928) was an English urban planner and founder of the garden city movement, known for his publication To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), the description of a utopian city in which people live harmoniously together with nature. The publication resulted in the founding of the garden city movement, and the building of the first garden city, Letchworth Garden City, commenced in 1903.
He returned to London in 1876 and continued his life with this profession. He was very interested in inventions and planned his own inventions and held a small workshop to introduce the theories he had developed. During this period, Ebenezer Howard had the opportunity to read widely and in-depth on social issues, and as a result of this effort, he published his book Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1898. He married Elizabeth Ann Bills in 1879; He had three daughters and one son. He died in Welwyn Garden City on 1 May 1928.
Ebenezer Howard was interested in scientific subjects and mechanical problems. He worked on the development of the writing machine and the invention of a stenography machine. Howard remained close to British social reformism towards the end of the 19th century, without entering into the socialist mainstream.
In addition to these socialist ideologies, Howard was greatly influenced by Edward Bellamy's publication Looking Backway (1888). Particularly, the decreasing relationship between rapidly growing cities with the environment and social differentiation issues have attracted his attention.
Ebenezer Howard advocated the construction of garden cities to reduce the alienation of human society from nature. He thought that in order to ensure sustainable interactions, the social world should be reorganized and living spaces integrated with the environment should be created. After 1883, he began to explain the suggestions he had worked on carefully for a long time, first in private and then in public discussions.
He found and built the garden city model in the solution process of contemporary urbanization problems. He collected these theories in his book Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, published in 1898. Based on the ideas of Ebenezer Howard, the first garden city was founded in 1903 as the city of Letchworth. After the garden city model attracted attention, he founded the Garden City Union in England in 1899.