Ebenezer Howard Quotes

His aim was the creation of self sufficient small towns,really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge. - discussing Ebenezer Howards' Garden City

Ebenezer Howard’s vision of the Garden City would seem almost feudal to us. He seems to have thought that members of the industrial working classes would stay neatly in their class, and even at the same job within their class; that agricultural workers would stay in agriculture; that businessmen (the enemy) would hardly exist as a significant force in his Utopia; and that planners could go about their good and lofty work, unhampered by rude nay-saying from the untrained. It was the very fluidity of the new nineteenth-century industrial and metropolitan society, with its profound shiftings of power, people and money, that agitated Howard so deeply

The key to the problem how to restore the people to the land — that beautiful land of ours, with its canopy of sky, the air that blows upon it, the sun that warms it, the rain and dew that moisten it — the very embodiment of Divine love for man — is indeed a Master-Key, for it is the key to a portal through which, even when scarce ajar, will be seen to pour a flood of light on the problems of intemperance, of excessive toil, of restless anxiety, of grinding poverty — the true limits of Governmental interference, ay, and even the relations of man to the Supreme Power.

Ebenezer Howard, Frank L. Wright et Le Corbusier, avaient tous les trois compris qu'ils devaient associer des programmes de restructuration politique et économique à leurs programmes de reconstruction urbaine. Ils avaient conclus que les auteurs des projets s'étaient bornés à décorer le monde de toutes sortes de manières : ce qu'il fallait vraiment c'était le changer.

Howard, Wright et Le Corbusier se sont servit de leurs cités idéales pour dépeindre un monde où leurs objectifs économiques et sociaux étaient déjà atteints. Chacun d'eux voulait montrer que les projets de ville qu'il défendait n'était pas seulement rationnels et beaux en tant que tels, mais qu'ils concrétisaient les objectifs sociaux auxquels chacun croyait.

Les cités idéales étaient une pensée sociale en trois dimensions.