Radical legacy or intellectual indelicacy? Ebenezer Howard’s use of “the most admirable project of Thomas Spence” in the Garden City concept

Abstract

Ebenezer Howard, the father of the “Garden City” idea, explains in one of the concluding chapters of his Garden Cities of To-morrow (1898) that his concept is only the combination of three pre-existing ideas in the area of land and urban reform. One of these sources is the famous “Land Plan” of the revolutionary radical Thomas Spence (1750-1814). After characterising the social and political meaning of Spence’s “plan” and examining the content of the “unique combination of proposals” that is the Garden City in theory, the article seeks to explore how Howard’s borrowing from Spence takes part in an attempt to answer the so-called “land question” that runs through the 18th and 19th centuries. Howard’s project is rather socially conservative and based on class collaboration, inter-individual co-operation and mutual aid, all within an appeased version of capitalism (the original title of his book was To-morrow! A Peaceful Path to Real Reform until 1902). As such, it seems difficult to reconcile with Spence’s revolutionary ideas, which include the dispossession of land-owners as well as the ownership and control of all parish land by democratic parish corporations. A careful reading of both sources, as well as a close examination of the handling of Spence’s text by Howard, reveal that, in order to import certain aspects of the Land Plan into his own concept, the latter took with the former’s ideas liberties that verge on intellectual betrayal.

Keywords

• central government
• collective ownership
• commune
• contractual communities
• garden city
• history of ideas