Tomorrow's Garden Cities

Garden Cities of To-morrow, now with a new translation, at Arketon!

Ebenezer Howard's iconic book, Garden Cities of To-morrow, has been translated for Arketon by Selin Tosun and edited by Aykut Köksal. The book consists of two sections, successively presenting Howard's "Garden City" utopia and its real-world manifestation, Letchworth. The first section, containing the text titled Garden Cities of To-morrow, forms the main body of the book. The second section of the book includes an additional part that allows the reader to see how the "Garden City" theory came to life. This section begins with Robert Fishman's text "Building the Garden City," followed by pages featuring visuals ranging from the master plan and house projects designed by Letchworth's architects to photographs taken during the construction process and at various periods, promotional and communication materials, and even documents describing life in Letchworth.

The book's introduction features Ruşen Keleş's translation of Lewis Mumford's text "Garden Cities and Modern Town Planning," written for the 1946 edition of Garden Cities of To-morrow. In this introduction, Mumford states:

"In treating the improvement of villages and cities as a single problem, Ebenezer Howard showed himself far ahead of his time and more capable of discerning the depreciation of cities as cities than most of the urban planners of his era. His 'Garden Cities' concept was not merely an attempt to alleviate the concentration in large cities and thus enable the reconstruction of cities by utilizing falling land values, but also a proposal aimed at eliminating the inevitable association between the concentration in large cities and the dormitory suburbs they created. The temporary nature of the open plans of large cities and their connection with rural areas, and the lack of an industrial population and an employment base in dormitory suburbs, make these suburbs the most useless environments ever prepared for people. Such suburbs are a middle-class imitation of the absurdities found in the palaces of absolute rulers who created fantasy worlds for themselves in Versailles and Nymphenburg. Garden Cities, as understood by Howard, are not suburbs, but the exact opposite of suburbs. A Garden City is not a self-contained settlement of a more rural character, but a more perfect organization where a productive urban life can be found."