Manifestoes and Transformations in the Early Modernist City by Christian Hermansen Cordua

Author:Christian Hermansen Cordua [Cordua, Christian Hermansen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Regional Planning, Public Policy, Political Science
ISBN: 9781317101192
Google: 89goDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-05-13T11:06:05+00:00

I will not cease from mental strife,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land.15

The image of a green and pleasant land was both a reality and an aspiration; the reality was already being eroded and its restoration an aspiration. There followed a train of romantic poets, artists and political campaigners who took up the call, and none more so than the mid century idealist, John Ruskin. It is not surprising that Howard invokes Ruskin as well as Blake to rally support for his own cause. Ruskin could always be relied upon to remind his readers in evocative terms of a disappearing idyll:

As the art of life is learned, it will be found at last that all lovely things are also necessary – the wild flower by the wayside as well as the tended corn, and the wild birds and creatures of the forest as well as the tended cattle, because man doth not live by bread only, but also by the desert manna, by every wondrous word and unknowable work of God.16

From his use of such quotes it might be thought that Howard was himself an avowed romantic, resistant to the changes that were underway. The term garden city adds to that supposition with its pastoral undertones. But that was not the case, and he showed that he could see elements of good in modern trends just as he could in those rooted in tradition. Thus, in a revealing passage he speaks enthusiastically of the technological wonders of his age and of the prospects for the coming century:

what possibilities are opened up by the bare contemplation of the discovery of new motive powers, new means of locomotion, perhaps, through the air, new methods of water-supply, or a new distribution of population, which must of itself render many material forms altogether useless and effete. we may perhaps discover a grand opportunity for producing not only better forms of wealth, but how to produce them under far juster conditions.17

Howard’s willingness to contemplate, and even to be in favour of, material progress is a crucial standpoint, and one that separates him from a romantic fundamentalist like John Ruskin (who really wanted the world to return to an imagined lost idyll of the late fourteenth century and an age of hand-produced goods) and, to a lesser extent, William Morris, who could at least tolerate some forms of machinery.

There is a further indication of Howard’s acceptance of a world that was rapidly changing in his ambivalent response to Edward Bellamy’s utopian portrayal, Looking Backward.18 Bellamy was an American socialist who wrote his famous work in his native city of Boston, which he uses as the setting for a description of a transformed model of society, projected into the imagined future of the year 2000. Howard was at first riveted by this imaginative picture of a society that embraced new technologies in the pursuit of a better world. He then reflected that, for all its virtues, Bellamy’s

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