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> They eventually settled on the “garden city,” a design popularized in the 1960s by English urban planner Ebenezer Howard. That's your problem right there! Th
by NikkiA 3y ago
> They eventually settled on the “garden city,” a design popularized in the 1960s by English urban planner Ebenezer Howard.
That's your problem right there! The 'garden city' concept had already failed by the 1960s (both of the true garden cities were built by Howard in 1903 (Letchworth) and 1920 (Welwyn GC) - he died in 1928, so he wasn't popular in the 1960s).
What they were probably getting confused over, was the new town concept of the post-WW2 era, when towns such as Slough and Milton Keynes, which, as brutalist horrors, were already roundly panned by everyone except fashionista architects at the time they were built, and predictably sank into deprivation and decay by the 1980s.
Neither Garden Cities nor New Towns took into account any of the organic usage patterns that developed in organic towns, and thus ended up producing cultural wastelands for different reasons - Garden Cities because howard was a Quaker and had unpopular religious motivations resulting in stepford style living. And new towns because brutalism is depressing as fuck unless you're a fashionista, and encourages antisocial behaviour in normal people.
- NikkiA 3y agoFor reference on how desolate the place is, Letchworth is the only place I've been casually offered heroin while minding my own business walking through the city centre during broad daylight.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- circlefavshape 3y agoI've been offered heroin on the street in daylight in Dublin (Ireland), which is hardly desolate
- jrflowers 3y agoLos Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Miami, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Portland are similarly desolate in this way
- NikkiA 3y agoBit of a difference between those cities, and letchworth, which had a population of about 10,000 at the time.
- jeffbee 3y agoThe idea that MK is deprived, decaying, and hated is certainly not universally held, least of all by the people who live there and say they are happy. You can quibble about its nontraditional layout but for the work-from-home era it seems almost prescient. If I had to nuke one of MK or Poundbury it would be the latter.
- switch007 3y agoI thought MK has severe infrastructure issues that the council has no money to fix, and everyone is just ignoring it? I could be totally wrong though
- snakeyjake 3y ago1960s urban planners. Never before in history had there been a profession as infested with snake-oil peddling, arrogant, hucksters. 70 years later numerous cities all around the world are still dealing with the echoes of their concrete monstrosities, err, monstrocities. A famous and skilled surgeon suffering from the most deeply entrenched and severe god complex known to medicine would take one look at the lot of them and say "god damn you got me beat".
- collyw 3y agoYou should look into the World Economic Forum
- snakeyjake 3y agoI don't believe that the covid vaccine is a mass sterilization conspiracy, so I don't really have a problem with the WEF.
- _chu1 3y agoNo matter what you think about the vaccine, the WEF is something straight out of Deus Ex.
- pavlov 3y agoThey’re not all failures around the world though. The one 1960s garden city / new town project that I’m most familiar with is Tapiola, part of Finland’s capital Helsinki area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapiola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapiola It was praised by the 1960s urban planners and architects, yet remains attractive today with high property values and a popular mix of suburban-style living combined with easy access to urban services. (Though it surely helps that Helsinki built an expensive metro line straight through Tapiola, and that some of Finland’s leading universities were relocated into the area from central Helsinki within the past 10-15 years.)