Question 1 of 7: The Garden City Concept and Howard’s “Three Magnets”

Question 1: The Garden City Concept and Howard’s “Three Magnets” (20 marks)

Question text not reproduced: the examination questions are © Engineers and Geoscientists BC. Open the official past paper (linked at the top of this page) to read the question, then follow the worked solution below.

The Garden City is the seminal late-nineteenth-century response to the crisis of the industrial city. It was formulated by Ebenezer Howard in To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898, re-issued in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow) and is the intellectual root of modern town planning, of the British and Canadian new-towns movement, and of much suburban design that followed. Its purpose was to escape the overcrowding, pollution, high rents and social misery of Victorian cities such as London while avoiding the isolation and stagnation of the depopulating countryside — to capture the advantages of both.

The concept. Howard proposed building, on cheap agricultural land, a network of new, planned, self-contained towns of strictly limited size — he suggested about 30,000 residents on a site of some 1,000 acres, ringed by a permanent agricultural greenbelt of about 5,000 acres that would supply food, provide recreation and, crucially, fix the town’s ultimate size. Each Garden City would balance homes and jobs locally (industry deliberately located within the town so residents could live near work), be laid out with generous open space, tree-lined avenues, a central park and a civic core, and separate its land uses in concentric zones (civic centre → housing → a peripheral industrial ring served by a circular railway). Land would be held in common (by the community or a trust) and leased, so that the increase in land value created by the town’s growth — the “unearned increment” — returned to the community to repay its cost and fund services rather than enriching private speculators. When one town reached its planned limit, growth would spill into a new Garden City nearby rather than by unlimited expansion, producing a polycentric cluster (a “Social City”) of towns linked by rapid transit and separated by permanent green belts. Letchworth (1903) and Welwyn (1920) were the first built examples; the idea directly shaped Britain’s postwar New Towns and Canadian planned communities such as Don Mills and the greenbelt/new-town planning around Ottawa.

The “Three Magnets” diagram. Howard opened his book with the celebrated Three Magnets diagram to explain why people move and how the Garden City would attract them. He asked “The People — Where will they go?” and depicted the population as iron filings drawn between three magnets, each with its attractions and its repulsions:

The Town magnet offers social opportunity, employment, high wages and amusement, but repels with slums, gin palaces, isolation of crowds, foul air, costly drainage, high rents and distance from nature. The Country magnet offers natural beauty, fresh air, sunshine, low rents and abundant water, but repels with a lack of society and of employment, low wages, long hours, poor drainage and a sense of desertion. Howard’s decisive move was the third magnet, “Town–Country,” the Garden City itself, which is engineered to combine the attractions of the first two while eliminating their repulsions: the beauty of nature and social opportunity, fields and parks of easy access and a full range of jobs at good wages, low rents and low prices and bright homes and gardens, freedom and co-operation. The “main dimensions” of the diagram, therefore, are the paired attractions–versus–drawbacks of Town and of Country, resolved in the synthesis of the third magnet — a rhetorical device that made the case that a deliberately planned town could out-compete both the industrial city and the countryside for the loyalty of the people.