The Nature of Garden City Ambiguities and Contradictions

The garden city movement is a method of urban planning initiated in the United Kingdom in 1898 by Sir Ebenezer Howard (1850~1928), in his publication To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898). Garden cities were intended to be planned, self-contained communities surrounded by greenbelts, containing proportionate areas of residences, industry, and agriculture where people live harmoniously with nature. Howard envisaged a cluster of several relatively small garden cities as satellites of an industrial central city linked by road and rail.
Nevertheless, some foreign researchers have evasively used this phrase in reference to historic cities of Iran where a central residential area was surrounded by gardens and agricultural fields. Iranian scholars have further misused it in their descriptions of planning patterns in historic Persian settlements to the extent that it has now become a catchphrase in the Persian literature on the history of architecture and urban planning. This paper attempts to clarify the exact meanings of this phrase to clarify ambiguities and misunderstandings arising from this specious usage.