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Abstract
After the Great War, numerous housing estates on garden-city lines were created in Continental Europe under the command of state or local authorities, who took over from enlightened entrepreneurial initiatives or co-operative movements of the previous years. Admittedly, the cases of Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin express in the most complete form the synthesis of garden-city ideas and techniques into foreign planning practices. Based on published sources, this article places the schemes in their national context, and explores the planning tools for their realization, as they were formed by state traditions. Parisian garden cities were accomplished in a centralist mode by first-rate officials and professionals, as befits a country with the administrative eminence of France. In Belgium, under a similar framework, the quality of the outcome came out of direct contact between local people's cooperatives and their architects, who were engaged in social and environmental reform. The German approach was marked by the pioneering initiatives of municipalities, historically empowered for more independent decision-making. In diverse national and local backgrounds, the garden-city thought showed remarkable tenacity: variations of the Howardian ideas about land ownership persisted, ingenious financial mechanisms were efficiently set up, and community spirit was often able to survive the official mode of home allocation. Finally, commitment to social, economic, and technical advancement brought many of the estates in discussion to the leading edge of the architectural production in Europe.
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to architects Chryssa Alafostergiou for redrawing the plans of Parisian garden suburbs and Yannis Solomidis for the plans of Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin suburbs.
Notes
This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Erratum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2013.774807)
Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902), subsequent version of Tomorrow, a Peaceful Path to Urban Reform (1898).
See for a broad picture of that period in Britain, Ward, Planning and Urban Change, 9–73. For the overall dimensions of housing provision from 1919 to 1939, see pp. 44–7.
About the cities that are mentioned in the paragraph, see Ward, Planning the Twentieth-Century City, 83–143; Tafuri and Dal Co, Modern Architecture, 153–73, and the special issue of Architectural Review, June 1978. For the German cities, see Diefendorf, In the Wake of War, about the housing problem between the wars. Apart from these cases, Stockholm and Athens, with their programmes of garden suburbs widely varied in scope and outcome, are little known outside their countries.
Cacheux, Les Habitations Ouvrières en tous Pays.
See Reid, Brentham. A History of the Pioneer Garden Suburb 1901–2001; Bianci et al., Histoire d'un domaine; and Rößger and other articles in “Gartenstadt Hellerau.”
See for a comprehensive presentation of the Parisian case, Rea, “The Garden City and the Growth of Paris,” 343–52.
After the elections of May 1924, a progressive majority was formed by Socialists, Radical-Socialists (centre-left) and their allies. The period till 1940 was marked by progressive electoral majorities, which, however, did not guarantee political stability. For the connection of politics to social housing in Britain, France and Germany from 1919 to 1939 see Harloe, The People's Home?, 86–209.
See the excellent research of Roze, “Les cités-jardins de la Région d'Ile-de-France.”
Dumont, Le logement social à Paris 1850–1930, 156–8.
Sellier, 1921. See Sellier, Une cité pour tous, 1998, 85. During the interwar time, 3000 illegal operations of a scale larger than “family business” turned agrarian land on the periphery of Paris into building plots, and subsequently into self-built areas of no infrastructure. Fourcaut, La banlieue en morceau.
Dumont, Le logement social à Paris 1850–1930, 143.
Read, “The Garden City and the Growth of Paris,” 346 and 352.
Uyttenhove, “The Garden City Education of Belgian Planners,” 271–83.
Emile Vinck was the executive director of the International Union of Cities (Union Internationale des Villes, UIV), a body linked to European socialist movements, from its creation in Belgium in 1913 till 1948.
Most of the information about Belgium is taken from Marcel Smets’ engaging book, L'avènement de la cité-jardin en Belgique, in which he examines the response of architectural radicalism to community needs, via the garden city thought.
Smets, L'avénement de la cité-jardin en Belgique, 92–4.
Franchini, “Le temps des Cités-jardins,” 75.
Lambrichs, “Les cites-jardins en Belgique,” 66.
Harloe, The People's Home?, 119.
Miller Lane, “Modern Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918–1945,” 260.
Diefendorf, In the Wake of War, 111.
Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918–1945, 89.
The largest ones were GAGFAH (Anonymous Society for the building of dwellings for employees), DeGeWo (German Society for the Promotion of Housing Construction), and GEHAG (see further on). Reinborn, Städtebau im 19. und 20 Jahrhundert, 113. They exercised planning and design activities and employed “social contractors,” that is limited-profit high-efficiency construction companies, the so called “Bauhütten.” See Siedlungen der Berliner Moderne, 110.
Frankfurt was run by a coalition of Social Democrats, German Democrats and the (Catholic) Centre. For a vigorous account of its achievements, see Bullock, “Housing in Frankfurt, 1925 to 1931.”
Ruhe, “Der Sozialwohnungsbau in Frankfurt am Main zwischen 1925 und 1933,” 17.
Ruhe counts 26 settlements, some of which fairly small, nearing on the whole 15,000 dwellings. May's account in 1930 was of 15,474 (Ruhe, “Der Sozialwohnungsbau,” 59, 115).
Höhenblick in Ginheim (1926–1927) was designed by May, Herbert Boehm, and D. H. Rudloff. Nothing was found about its area and number of dwellings.
Standardization was expressed by the German word Typisierung and signified by the letter T in various circumstances, in connotation with the famous car model T of the Ford industry, which was produced in 1908, and made a devastating success in the following decade. Ruhe, “Der Sozialwohnungsbau,” 34. For the rest of the paragraph, see p. 72.
See Henderson, “Römerstadt: The Modern Garden City.”
Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918–1945, 90.
Goldstein (in Schwanheim, to the south), of 8,500 dwellings, was designed by May, Herbert Boehm, Walter Schwagenscheidt and others. The unemployed future tenants were given the plans and the building materials to build their own houses. Every settler had to work for his house at least 2700 hours, under the guidance of city workers of the programme “Emergency.” 800 dwellings were eventually built this way. Once established, the households were given allotments (300–400 sq. metres each) in order to produce food for a living. Coal was used for heating, water was taken from wells, and toilets used peat instead of water (a first step towards the “compost toilets” of today's ecovillages). Ruhe, “Der Sozialwohnungsbau,” 69–71.
Berlin had 1.9 million people in 1918 and 3.8 million in 1923, after the restructuring of administrative boundaries.
GEHAG (Non-Profit Housing Savings and Building Shareholding Company, Anonymous Society), merged smaller building societies, and was provided with capital by the Berlin trade unions and The Society Supervising Housing Provision, Wohnungsfürsorgengesellschaft (Miller Lane, 1985, op. cit., 104).
See Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918–1945, 103 and Reinborn, Städtebau im 19. und 20 Jahrhundert, 113. According to Haspel, Berlin built approximately 9000 rental flats of subsidized rents in the years 1919–1923, and from 1924 to 1930 another 135,000. Haspel, “Introduction,” 22. For the records of London and Vienna, see Ward, Planning the Twentieth-Century City, 142–3.
Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918–1945, 103. For there have been consulted the following sources: Siedlungen der Berliner Moderne, Reinborn, Städtebau im 19. und 20 Jahrhundert, Brenne, Bruno Taut, and Berning et al., Berliner Wohnquartiere.
The number of dwellings in Hufeisen (Horseshoe) does not include the ones that were not designed by Taut etc., which are contained in the part surrounded by the streets Teterower, Buschkrug, Gielower, and Fritz Reuter (29 Ha, shaded in the plan). At the demand of conservative politicians, that land was given to construction company DeGeWo, and designed on more conventional lines, by architects Engelmann and Fangmeyer (first names not found). 900 dwellings were built there in 1927 (Siedlungen der Berliner Moderne, 78).
Berning et al., Berliner Wohnquartiere, 138–41, 146–9.
Siemenstadt and Weisse Stadt had a central heating plant, a central laundry, a school, playgrounds and shops. Weisse Stadt had also a café, a children's home and a health centre. Siedlungen der Berliner Moderne, 115, 116.
Recessed balcony into the volume of the building is also referred to as loggia in the Continent. Besides Berlin, it can be found in Frankfurt's Hellerhof, and in the Parisian Genevilliers and Pré-Saint-Gervais. It took its most expressive form in the U-shaped blocks of Le Plessis-Robinson (now demolished).
Tafuri and Dal Co, Modern Architecture, 153.
According to Brigit Grafton Green, Hampstead Garden Suburb archivist, the Trust regained the freehold in 1989 (after it had been sold to a private firm) for the time up to year 3961. Grafton Green, Hampstead Garden Suburb 1907–1977, 19.
The city owned 46% of the areas that could be developed. Nearly half of the municipal land was kept for the city's park to the south. On the whole, the city owned 336 hectares of land in 1890, and 1500 hectares in 1923. Ruhe, “Der Sozialwohnungsbau,” 10, 60, 62, for the rest of the paragraph also.
Homesgarth and Meadow Way Green, Cooperative Quadrangles in Letchworth, 1913, 1915. Hayden, The Great Domestic Revolution, 234–6.
De Michelis, “La maison du peuple allemande,” 103.
Baty-Tornikian, Architecture et Social-démocratie, 42.
Roze, “Les cités-jardins de la Région d'île-de-France,” Suresnes file.
Henderson, “Römerstadt,” 334
There are, however, two streets packed with identical houses, dating from the very first days of the endeavour, when no architectural advice was taken.
Imbert, “Counting Trees and Flowers,” 108.
Reinborn, Städtebau im 19. und 20 Jahrhundert, 104.
The first aphorism is attributed to Frederic Osborn; the second was formulated by Alexander Ruhe, mayor of Frankfurt and historian (Ruhe, “Der Sozialwohnungsbau,” 72).
In 1930 CIAM, high rise was sanctioned by Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Giedion as preferable on psychological and social grounds, contrary to the “excruciatingly detailed” economic study of Taut's associates Herbert Boehm and Eugen Kaufmann in favour of blocks no higher than five storeys. Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960, 49–50.
Dumont, Le logement social à Paris 1850–1930, 157.
Brenne, Bruno Taut. In a few cases, as Hufeisen Siedlung or Onkel Toms Hütte, it is not quite clear how many dwellings exactly were designed by Taut.
Abt, “Ernst May und das Neue Frankfurt,” 170.
The following passage is indicative: “It would be a fault to think that it is enough to have a good layout, an orientation that gives the houses the maximum of sunshine […]. The individual action of every proprietor, every architect must also be reduced as much as possible, and all diffused egoistic energies be channelled and made able to envisage the simplicity and the effect of [working] together every moment. […].” Eggericx, “Les principes essentiels d'un quartier-jardin.” Cited by Lambrichs, “Les cites-jardins en Belgique,” 61.
Ward, Planning the Twentieth-Century City, 45.
Ibid., 80.
Miller Lane, “Modern Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918–1945,” 260.
Ward, Planning and Urban Change, 61
44 governments from the end of the Great War till mid 1940, when the Germans occupied France (elections of 1919, 1924, 1928, 1932, 1936 Front Populaire).
Sellier communicating to residents in 1930 and 1932, Une cité pour tous, 172, 177.
According to Van der Swaelmen, “L'effort moderne en Belgique.” The first generation included Hankar, Horta, Van de Velde. The second, inspired by the School of Amsterdam and the socialist ideology, included Bodson, Kalewaérts, Dewin, Diongre, Pompe, Van der Swaelmen. In the third generation, inspired from Destijl, there were Allard, Bourgeois, Bragard, de Ligue, Eggericx and others (Franchini, “Le temps des Cités-jardins,” 76).
Smets, L'avènement de la cité-jardin en Belgique, 115, 141.
In the cooperative Cité du Homborch, Fernand Bodson arranged for bricks to be constructed in a field next to the site, to speed the building of the 120 houses. He took to going to the train station every day, to select unemployed workers suitable for the job and bring them to the construction site. Cités-jardins, 1920–1940, 85.
Abt, “Ernst May und das Neue Frankfurt,” 131. He adds that May had removed (fired or sent to retirement…) members of the staff that were ill prepared or unwilling to work under the principles of the New Objectivity (or New Building, Neues Bauen).
Henderson, “Römerstadt,” 325–6.
There are some exceptions to this rule: Jean Valter, the architect of Paris-jardins, was committed to professional success and created an economic imperium out of his work (Bianci et al., Histoire d'un domaine, 228); and Paul Schmitthenner, who designed Staaken, the war-time state garden city to the west of Berlin, was a founding member the group Der Block, publicly opposing the modernists, and later he became a member of the National Socialist Party.
Bourgeois, “Architecture,” 63.