Ah, the joys of the new garden city, town and village. Roses round the door, children playing carefree on safe, car-less streets, and neighbours chatting over the garden fence. Community – just like the good old days – idyllic living, idyllic world.
Sadly the reality will be dull, profit-driven dormitory towns.
Ebenezer Howard’s plan for garden cities was published in 1898 to solve some of the terrible social problems of the period. Conditions in the London slums were appalling. Many large families lived and somtimes worked – in single rooms without sanitation, in extreme poverty. But life was grim in the countryside too. Deserted villages had little to offer – land lay idle and many people were unemployed while others worked punitive hours for low wages.
The garden city was an incredible breakthrough, bringing the best of town and city together while eliminating the worst. It aimed to create plentiful, spacious housing and full employment, in walkable communities with clean air and lots of green open space. What’s not to like?
But the question should really be whether an idea from 1898 is right for 2017, or whether we are being blinded by a nostalgic vision of yesteryear.
The garden city’s central idea was to introduce functional zoning – separating dwelling from workplace. Before this time, villages, towns and cities were a jumble of homes and workspaces that created what the brilliant urban theorist Jane Jacobs would later describe as the “intricate mingling” of different functions – essential in her view to counter “the great blight of dullness” in cities.
At the time, workplaces were often factories that covered their neighbourhoods in filthy smog, so it was logical to separate them from housing. The new housing of the time was designed to prevent, and managed through harsh tenancy agreements that prohibited home-based work, because opposition to this working practice was widespread. But times have changed – radically.
In 2017 we face a different, although equally acute, set of problems. But Howard’s real genius was not the garden city idea – it was his ability to find a new answer to a seemingly intractable set of problems. We should be following his method, not adopting his out-of-date idea.
In 2017 we have an environmental crisis of catastrophic proportions, a vast and rapidly growing population, a chronic shortage of housing and unsustainable pressure on our transport infrastructure. Unfortunately, the garden city idea is not going to solve this. We need to stop commuting, and become far more rooted in our neighbourhoods – and we could.
Why not design our cities, towns and villages to reflect the fact that we are becoming a nation of homeworkers? One in seven of the UK population now works mainly at or from home, millions more part time, and this number is growing rapidly.
Large corporations adopting home-working policies reduce their costs and create happier, healthier and therefore more productive workforces. Most of the booming but largely invisible micro-businesses, with fewer than 10 staff, are or have been at some time run from their owners’ homes. These are the people, from curtain-maker to website designer, architect to caterer or music teacher to eBay seller, that Iain Scott of CanDoPlaces calls the “accidental entrepreneurs” andthey now represent a significant proportion of the economy.
Working from home gives people from all walks of life more control over their lives. It reduces commuting, and therefore carbon emissions and intensifies the use of the overall building stock. If fewer people go out to work, we need fewer workplaces. Redundant industrial and commercial buildings can be converted into much needed housing.
Few contemporary home-based workers live and work in conditions that suit them. But they could. Instead of building miserable cookie-cutter housing, the home and the workplace could be combined in all sorts of ways to make “workhomes”. These could be built with street-facing workspace, like Alison Brooks Architects’ prize-winning Newhall Be scheme outside Harlow, or fully-glazed top-floor workspaces to maximise natural light, like historic weavers’ houses. Well-insulated, serviced garden sheds could be included as standard. Streets of houses could alternate with streets of workplaces, linked by private gardens or courtyards inside each urban block to create mews.
Or dwellings and workplaces could alternate along the street, including shops, offices, bakeries, restaurants, workshops, consulting rooms or studios. Apartment buildings could include levels of workspace, managed collectively by inhabitants or by a hub organisation, not just for desk-based work, but also for sculpture and catering, furniture-making and child-minding, hairdressing and printing. And, conversely, office buildings could interleave residential floors or wings. Courtyard buildings could be designed with homes on to the street and workplaces in the courtyard, or the other way around, with workspaces facing the street and homes facing inwards.
Clusters of workhomes could be designed around families with dependent children or elders and others around noisy, dirty occupations. Cafes and bars with free wifi already provide an extension to home-based workspace that helps combat social isolation. This could be expanded to provide hubs in the supermarket or launderette, the chemist or cinema.
The possibilities are endless. Such a move would involve rejigging the way we think about housing and workspace in everyday life, as well as a raft of governance frameworks, from planning to property taxation, that obstruct home-based workers. No mean feat – but it would be worth it.
- Frances Holliss is emeritus reader in architecture at the Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University.
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