Discuss the Significance of Ebenezer Howard as a Pioneer essays

Discuss the Significance of Ebenezer Howard as a Pioneer essays Discuss the Significance of Ebenezer Howard as a Pioneer of British Town and Country Planning. To start answering the question of the significance of Howard as a pioneer of town and country planning, the first, and most obvious question that has to be asked is whether he himself had the idea first. And on first inspection this does not seem to be the case. Theodor Fritsch, a German man that lived from 18521933 claimed authorship of the idea in 1896 in his book Die Stadt der Zukunft. (Schuber, D. 2004 pp3) Fritschs book was published in 1896, Howards idea of the Garden city was first published in 1898 in his book To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. (Schuber, D. 2004 pp3). This clearly shows that Howards book was infact predated by Fritschs book by two years. And most importantly, at that time, Howard could have gained access to the book, modified the ideas slightly, and simply taken them for his own. The thoughts behind the two ideas could not have been more different however. Howard had planned his garden cities as a kind of emancipation of the working class, through state run public services, funded by the rents of the people living there, instead of the rents simply going to the landlords. For Ebenezer Howard the problem of inner city squalor and overcrowding was not caused by the inability of the people to help them selves but the urbanizing process itself (Andrew, C. et al 1979 pp27) In theory the money would be spent on public services, the lives of the average workers that lived in the garden city would dramatically improve upon the slums of inner city life, while the workers left in the inner city would benefit from the decreased living costs brought on by a market place suddenly finding itself lacking in tenants, as the rules of supply and demand go. However, in practice, probably because the rule of not being able to hold the lease of a plot of land ...