In the garden city
On The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
This is part one of what would probably be a permanently ongoing series. This is about the city. The ones I was raised in, the one that currently does so, the ones I have encountered, the ones that wait still to be discovered and learned. I’m not looking to prove anything. I’m just looking. walking. searching. wondering. asking. Some days, I am finding. On those days I could confidently write one of these.
I am building a path with no plain direction. I do not know where it would end. I am directionless, as I often am in the city, familiar or otherwise, searching for street signs and lamp posts and billboards, or friendly faces who would stop to show me the way. Agents, storytellers, a single thread in a measureless web. That too, is what I am. nothing more.
What in Al Gore’s name is a Garden City.
I’m so sure it’s just smart nomenclature, no hidden insinuations. I mean, really, it’s not hard to miss. The supertrees loom. The highways lined with rain trees. Public housing blocks dotted with rooftop gardens. Parks, parks, public parks, everywhere. Constant talk of a green and sustainable city. It’s a city lush with greenery. A city with gardens, literally. Right?
The Garden City is central to the Singapore life. It’s what makes this city so liveable, walkable, breathable, it’s what makes it so simple to navigate, so clean and crisp. The concept was introduced by Lee Kuan Yew in 1967: “A two-stage plan, which will make Singapore ‘a garden city beautiful with flowers and trees, and as tidy and litterless as can be,’ was outlined by the Prime Minister…” a Straits Times clipping reads. It was an enormously successful campaign. If you were to walk Singapore as a tourist, you might indeed paint the city as ideal, impeccable, utopic. Citizens are happy with this campaign, too: NParks reported in 2013 that 80% of Singaporeans are proud of this so-called Garden City, a number so gratifying they launched a follow-up campaign, a different one, meant to enhance and improve the Garden City. The name? City in a Garden. Now I know they’re just being smart.
But this might have been, I think, an attempt at rebranding. Now, this isn’t some gotcha piece, really, this is simply me learning that Garden City is a century-old concept, and the nomenclature, I realise, underpins a particular vision that was made possible by particular beliefs and politics.
Ebenezer Howard, an English court reporter, first proposed the Garden City in 1898 in a book titled To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (yikes). He introduced what became known as the 3 magnets – later broken down into 3 further elements. The 3 magnets, according to Howard, was the Town, the Country, and the Townn-Country, his proud invention. "Town and country must be married,” he wrote, “and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization." Howard wanted to merge the busy industrial town with the lush suburban countryside, intersecting bodies and nature. This creation was to be a natural haven that could shelter the community from urban encroachment (in the historical contexts of Howards time, this means the Victorian-era industrialisation vortex).
This intersection is what Howard calls the Garden City, and it comes with 3 main elements: Decentralisation, or the redistribution of population and industry from the overly-crowded city; The Garden, which ensures an agricultural belt and well-planted open spaces in living preserves; and Communal landownership – permanent control of all urban territories by the city. Jane Jacobs illustrated the Garden City in her 1961 text that the Garden City “was to be encircled with a belt of agriculture. Industry was to be in its planned preserves; and in the centre were to be commercial, club and cultural places, held in common. The town and green belt, in their totality, were to be permanently controlled by the public authority under which the town was developed, to prevent speculation or supposedly irrational changes in land use and also to do away with temptations to increase its density – in brief, to prevent it from ever becoming a city.” Jane Jacobs viewed Howard’s programme as a block on urban diversity and vitality; hiding necessary chaos behind “a screen of trees”, Jacobs wrote, quoting Nathan Glazer. She later described her objections: “He conceived of good planning as a series of static acts; in each case the plan must anticipate all that is needed and be protected, after it is built, against any but the most minor subsequence changes. He conceived of planning also as essentially paternalistic, if not authoritarian. He was uninterested in the aspects of the city which could not be abstracted to serve his Utopia.” To Jacobs, Howard imagined self-sufficient small towns that are incredibly nice places — “if you were docile and had no plans of your own.”
Jacobs delivered a strong blow, but with reason. The Garden City movement, she wrote, became a phenomenon that was widely adopted by urban planners, forming the basis of “virtually all modern city planning”. One ensuing movement that she highlighted was Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, which envisioned Singapore “skyscrapers within a park”. Jacobs described the Radiant City as a “wonderful mechanical toy”, an architectural work so dazzling and harmonius, so orderly and easy to understand, that it said everything in a flash, “like a good advertisement.”
I understand Jacobs’ sentiments. A City’s density and dynamism is part of its appeal, and the Garden City infrastructure permits neither, promising only a sterile and prosaic future. But what kind of socio-political environment was the Garden City built upon, and what kind would it produce?
Samuel Clevenger and David Andrews provided some answers in their 2017 paper ‘A Peaceful Path to’ Healthy Bodies: The Biopolitics of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City. They wrote that Howard sought to restore “healthfulness” to the community, a biopolitical agenda that linked directly to urban working class bodies and culture. They explained that Garden City planners envisioned “a pre-industrial, pastoral living and social arrangements”, as opposed to the ravages of Victorian urban maelstrom. Early twentieth century advocates of English garden cities, they wrote, were Anglo-saxon elites who “exhibited a paternalist and benevolent approach to working class health that was, at least partially, imbued with a racial nationalism preoccupied with the preservation of British imperial strength.” The promise of the integration of rural, open spaces, as well as “civilised” recreational activities, made the Garden City a convenient instrument for the elites to preserve “the racial and moral vitality of the British Empire.” It’s eugenics, Clevenger and Andrews argue, and the model offers only a bourgeois definition of health and competency, and a strategy to maintain bodies that would willingly reproduce “capitalist social and spatial relations.”
The Garden City is a dream of a powerful few. The Garden City is a Utopia. The kind of socio-political environment that the Garden City would produce is summed nice and well by Jacobs, who wrote: “As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge.”
Perhaps it was a good idea to rename the Singapore Garden City, after all. But alas, as Shakespeare proclaimed – a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
