In 1898, surrounded by the coal smoke, cholera, and tuberculosis of industrial cities like London, Manchester, and Chicago, Ebenezer Howard set out to cure the modern city. Influenced by utopian books like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, he published what became Garden Cities of Tomorrow, with a rigid plan for exactly 32,000 people on 9,000 acres: central parks ringed by a glass arcade, concentric housing, radial boulevards, and a permanent agricultural green belt. His three magnets theory weighed the town against the country and proposed a town-country blending the best of both. The land would be held in trust, so rising values funded roads, schools, and pensions instead of landlords, and once a city was full, the next would be built separately and linked by rail.

In 1899 he formed the Garden City Association, but the cooperative movement refused to fund it, so wealthy investors expecting dividends stepped in. At Letchworth in 1904, Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker discarded his geometry for a layout that followed the terrain, and rising rents filled the town with the middle class. In 1919 Howard borrowed from friends to buy land for Welwyn Garden City, only 20 miles from London. Developers later took the look without the economics, creating the commuter suburb.

• How the land value capture scheme was meant to return the unearned increment to residents
• Earlier ideas from Leonardo da Vinci and Adelheid von Poninska on satellite cities and green rings
• Lewis Mumford’s argument that a true garden city is the opposite of a suburb
• Garden city influence on New Delhi, Canberra, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and exclusive enclaves in Japan
• Singapore’s city in a garden codes requiring developers to replace lost greenery, and Walt Disney’s 1966 Epcot plan echoing Howard’s diagrams