Ebenezer Howard Quotes
It is deeply to be deplored that the people should continue to stream into the over-crowded cities, and should thus further deplete the country districts.
Howard was one of the first people to recognize the migration from the country to the cities brought about by the Industrial Revolution and then suggest solutions. He advocated planned suburban communities that had some elements of the country, but allowed a density of people to function in an industrial economy. He called them “Garden Cities”. Forest Hills in New York and other American planned communities were much influenced by his thinking as were many other new communities since.
Ebenezer Howard, 1850–1928, English Community Planner, Designer of Early Suburbs, Founder of the Town and Country Planning Association, A Peaceful Path to Real Reform
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Spengler and some others viewed with alarm the urban migration that had come with the industrial revolution. That migration was relatively minor compared to what took place in the remainder of the 20th century. In most developed coutries the rural population has become very small and the urban and suburban totally dominant.
This quotation is notable because it illustrates some of the ideas about cities that were suggested at the time. The growth of the suburbs was the largest of the changes that actually tool place.
In most of the world there has been a continual migration into cities.
See {621891} for a similar view.
Western populists were terribly suspicious of the cities. Note that the migration to cities was noticeable enough to be considered a problem. Better roads and the railroads made relocation easier.
Cahokia was a very large Native American city just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. In 1250, its population was about 15,000, comparable to that of London or Paris during the same period. At the time of the American Revolution, it was larger than New York, Boston of Philadelphia having 40,000 inhabitants at its peak. Tiahuanaco was a large city—30,000 at its peak—in Bolivia. The very ability to create and sustain such large communities shows that the Indians of the Americas were not simply hunter-gatherers but were very sophisticated in manipulating their environment and organizing large numbers of people.
Roosevelt thought like Jefferson that it was not desirable to have a large proportion of the population residing in cities, and one of the more successful aspects of the New Deal with the improvement of conditions in rural America. Despite that, the trend to the cities was inexorable in America with the rest of the world following that trend.
Sir Ebenezer Howard OBE 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.
