An English Paradise to Regain? Ebenezer Howard, the Town and Country Planning Association and English Ruralism

Although not a figure now widely known, Sir Ebenezer Howard has had a profound influence on British and, indirectly, on European and American urban planners. The historian Robert Fishman noted in 1978 that while Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright had become legendary as visionary architects and urban planners, Howard, probably more influential in the evolution of urban planning than either of them, has remained relatively obscure. Howard, like his more famous contemporaries, has always been characterized as Utopian by some because he imagined that city planning could aid in the creation of an entirely new society. For Howard, this society was to be one in which social divisions would be eliminated and the standards of living of all citizens would be raised through participatory social democracy organized at the city level. Howard attempted to realize this new society through building experimental communities to serve as models to be emulated elsewhere.