A New Civic Spirit for Garden City-states

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 320-344
Author(s):  
Matthew Wilson
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Design Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Garden City ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
World War ◽  
Garden Cities ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
City States

Sybella Gurney (1870–1926) made important and largely unrecognized contributions to British community design theory and practice. This essay begins with an exploration of her youthful social reform activities and academic influences including Leonard Hobhouse, John Ruskin, Auguste Comte, Frederic Le Play, John Stuart Mill, and Ebenezer Howard. These foundational pursuits inspired her to become an ardent cooperator affiliated with the Garden Cities movement and to serve as a sociologist seeking to kindle a “new civic spirit” for post -World War I reconstruction. Gurney, as part of an idealistic circle of thinkers which included Patrick Geddes, considered sociology as a means to realize complete Garden City-states based upon scientific, ethical, and participatory principles.

Italian Colonial Architecture and City Planning in North and East Africa

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mia Fuller
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Design Theory ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
World War ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
And Control

Italian colonial architecture began with styles directly transplanted from Italy to Eritrea—Italy’s first African colonial territory—in the 1890s. By the late 1920s, when Italy also held Libya and Italian Somalia, it had already created a substantial set of buildings (cathedrals and banks, for instance) in any number of unmodified Italian styles ranging from the classical to the neo-medieval and neo-Renaissance. Moorish (or “Oriental”) effects were also abundant, in another transplant from Europe, where they were extremely popular. Following the rise of design innovations after World War I, though, at the end of the 1920s, Italian Modernist architects—particularly the theoretically inclined Rationalists—began to protest. In conjunction with the fascist regime’s heavy investment in farming settlements, prestigious city centers, and new housing, architecture proliferated further, increasingly incorporating Rationalist design, which was the most thoughtfully syncretistic, aiming as it did to reflect particular sites while remaining Modernist. After Ethiopia was occupied in 1936, designers’ emphasis gravitated from the particulars of design theory to the wider canvas of city planning, which was driven by new ideas of racial segregation for colonial prestige and control.

Garden Cities in Theory and Practice

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.R. Sennett
Keyword(s):  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Urban Sprawl ◽  
Building Materials ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Garden City ◽  
Garden Cities ◽  
Human Scale ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Commuting Distances

Garden cities sought to combine the best of town and country living to provide healthy vibrant communities on a human scale: affordable housing for all classes in tree-lined streets with well-tended gardens, jobs within easy commuting distances, integrated transport, all surrounded by a green belt to prevent urban sprawl. The first examples were built in England in the early years of the twentieth century but the idea soon caught on internationally, with garden cities being planned and built in the USA, Australia, Germany and Japan amongst countries. Alfred Sennett's little known classic work offers one of the most comprehensive accounts of garden cities. Its two volumes cover not only the history and idea of the garden city but are unique in their encycopaedic coverage of the practicalities of the garden city. Among the topics covered are transport, building materials, agriculture, self-cleansing streets, rolling roofs, as well as the sociological aspects. He draws comparisons with cities of the ancient world but also with cities in other countries.

scholarly journals Jane Addams and the Lost Paradigm of Sociology

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-228
Author(s):  
Vessela Misheva
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Scientific Development ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Mission ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
Scientific Mission ◽  
The Social ◽  
Normal Period ◽  
Auguste Comte

The present work is the beginning of a discussion that again addresses the question of Jane Addams’ sociological heritage. That latter is defined as a puzzle which may finally have a solution in that all of the pieces now appear to have been collected. The approach taken to recovering Addams’ identity as a sociologist involves a historico-sociological exploration of the influences upon the formation of her sociological thought, with a focus on Auguste Comte, the Father of Sociology. The article argues that Addams emulated Comte’s scientific mission and took upon herself the task of continuing his project by following another route to the goal. She is thus Comte’s successor, and even rival, insofar as she sought to establish sociology as a science that may be placed in charge of producing knowledge about social life and has the social mission of finding solutions to social problems that politicians proved incapable of tackling. Addams emerges from the discussion as the creator of a sociological paradigm that was dismissed, dismantled, and then lost in the process of the scientific revolution that took place unnoticed after the end of World War I, when the normal period of the scientific development of sociology in America came to an end. The suppression during the 1920s of the type of sociology that Addams developed and adhered to has left sociology in a state of unresolved identity crisis and arrested scientific development.

scholarly journals Garden Cities of the 21st Century: A Sustainable Path to Suburban Reform

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 181-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Vernet ◽  
Anne Coste
Keyword(s):  
Energy Transition ◽  
Gated Communities ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Garden City ◽  
Low Density ◽  
Garden Cities ◽  
Sectoral Approach ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Original Concept

The garden city is often presented as a low-density, unsustainable and space-consuming archetype of suburbanization (Duany, Roberts, & Tallen, 2014; Hall, 2014; Safdie & Kohn, 1997). It has been deliberately also misused by property developers for gated communities (Le Goix, 2003; Webster, 2001). But these projects have little in common with the original concept of garden cities. We argue that the original garden city, as a theory (Howard, 1898) and as experiments (Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities), is a precedent that can be used in a sustainable approach that addresses a range of issues and concerns, such as housing, governance, the economy, mobility, the community, agriculture, energy and health. The recent Wolfson Economics Prize (2014) and the many new garden cities and suburbs projects currently planned in the UK have demonstrated the resurgence of this model in the planning world, both in terms of theory and practice. In this paper, we explore its potential in the light of environmental challenges. We therefore suggest that as a model, it can in particular underpin the evolution of suburbs in an era of energy transition, since these areas require an ecosystemic rather than sectoral approach to design.

BRITISH COMTISM AND MODERNIST DESIGN

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 1009-1040
Author(s):  
MATTHEW WILSON
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Design Theory ◽  
Le Corbusier ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

Scholars of political thought, sociology, and the arts have yet to fully explore the impact of positivism on modernist design theory and practice. This paper offers an intellectual history of the works of three generations of positivist sociologists who built on each other's works. They are Auguste Comte and Richard Congreve, Frederic Harrison and Charles Booth, and Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford. These actors developed different types of sociological survey, established a network of urban interventions, and proposed a series of planning programs and manifestos. It will be argued that their intention was to systematically reconcile international and domestic issues to realize a modern eutopia. Following this analysis, it will be shown that a similar language and practice appeared in the work of a diverse range of such modernist designers as Patrick Abercrombie, Sybella Gurney Branford, Louis Sullivan, H. P. Berlage, and Le Corbusier, among others.

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