STUDENT NAME: ROBERTA PEGORER LARA DE MORAES

STUDENT NUMBER: D13124074

Planning Theory
BSc Spatial Planning and Environmental Management
Level 3 Spatial Planning





Professor Hendrik W van der Kamp
11/11/2013





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Formerly, the planners had as their core objective the massive production of
plans in generally (plans for cities, villages, towns etc.), but, in the other hand, they had
not worries about how make those plans works. In other words, planners did not care
about how implement such plans. According to the book Urban Planning Theory, plans
were seen as blueprints for the future structure of towns, and they had an obsession
with the urban design and the physical blueprint.
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Due to that planners perspective, the
type of planning which does not have concerns about the plans implementation is
called blueprint planning. It also is called as master plans as it aims to cover everything
and create plan towns blueprints for it full development.
The blueprint aspect of earlier plans can be observed in the new towns plans
that were elaborated between 1940 and 1950. It was as specific and broad as it could
be and there were steps that lead the path to complete the elaborated plans, mostly
caring a lot about the forms, design and how the tow or city should be spatially
organized. This type of planning can be seen at Soria y Matas plans for linear cities, Le
Corbusiers plans for the contemporary city and, indeed, in the Ebenezer Howards
Garden City.
The fundamental idea of Ebenezer Howards Garden City is to merge the most
attractive points from the city and the countryside. He summarized the positive and
negative points from each one and listed it and his theory was that they would offset
each other after its junction. According to Howard, the garden city would have a fixed
limit around 32,000 people living on 1,000 acres of land and it would be circled by a
5,000 acres green belt, five times larger than the inhabited area. This limit were
established objecting the low population density that occur in the big cities. He also
suggested that on this rural area should be built all kind of urban institutions beyond
farms, like hospitals, reformatories and other types of public services.
It is possible to consider the Ebenezer Howards Garden City as a kind of
blueprint planning because his idea represents how urban planning should proceed in
a perfect world, but as was shown in Peter Halls book, Cities of Tomorrow, in most

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Taylor, Nigel. p. 14
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cases it is necessary a particular survey about the region and the populations needs,
because an ordinary plan that works in a specific region could not fit well in another
location, according to political, social and other aspects of the city, town etc. The British
town planning was very influenced by the garden city movement, as there are many
garden cities, villages and suburbs, each one with their peculiarities and issues that
occurred when it was been built.
Ebenezer Howards Garden Cities were considered as an expression of the
radical Utopian socialism, as the land would be collectively owned and its socialist view
was combined with a very conventional notion of urban size and form. After, some
planners called his perspective as really optimist.
The garden planning does not expected or predicted problems related to the
human influence in the plan, as the lands ownership would be shared. It just evaluate
how could be the best way to acquire the land even to those who have few or any
resources to afford it, targeting to ensure that anyone could have access to the amazing
garden cities purpose.
The essential concept of the garden city aims to equate the relationship between
the city and the countryside adopting some standards during its building and
establishing how people could afford to become the holder of their own land. However,
make a pre-established plan that could fit to different places, countries and populations
is almost impossible as each place or populations have their demand and problems to
be solved.
An example that could illustrate the blueprint character of the Ebenezer Howards
blueprint is in relation to the garden citys growth mechanism. He proposed that the
garden cities were built within not too large distance. Thus, as the population of the first
garden city reached the maximum suggested, another city would be built in the
immediate vicinity, providing that a rural area was maintained between the two garden
cities. But the garden city plan it is not able to predict how the population growth would
occur, how long the growth would take and if this prediction about merging two cities
could really occur. Otherwise, this type of construction could generate isolated cities.
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Anyhow, it is an evidence that the garden citys plan thought mainly about the spatially
growth caused by the likely population increased.
As the Garden City idea spread out through Europe, the concept was remolded
in some cases, which could be brought some difficulties to the establishment of the
garden city, as it run away of the Howards main idea (even though it was likely to
happen as each region has their needs).
To conclude, even though the blueprint planning could miss some specific points
or issues that are due to each location, this post-war planning concept did not express
only the importance of the physical form and the urban design and also did not only
want to deepen and to enhance the definition of planning. More than that, the ideas
aimed to incorporate some values which could add welfare to the region or to the
population who live in the planned town. The publications made by authors like
Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier related to planning cities and towns, for example,
expressed their point of view about how it should be developed, which characteristics it
would has to make people desire to live there and be satisfied with the life quality that
they would achieve in that place.


REFERENCES
Peter Hall. 1988. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and
Design in the Twentieth Century. Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 1988, 1996, 2002.
Taylor, Nigel (2007). Urban Planning Theory since 1945, London, Sage.