Ebenezer Howard built a better city than the government
That time a group of investors built the welfare city London couldn't.
This is part of “Let Cities Build Utopia,” an 11-part series on the future of cities. Collect the complete series as a print pamphlet, digital pamphlet, or audiobook. 👇🏻
After companies built the cities of Bournville and Port Sunlight, and gave them to residents, the social reformer Ebenezer Howard was inspired to systematize the model.
Cities had been poorly run for decades, and now industrialists were creating better ones all across England. Howard wondered whether it was possible to create similarly planned communities without relying on a single benevolent industrialist. In his 1898 book Garden Cities of To-Morrow, he outlined a plan in which small satellite villages were funded by social investors, owned and master-planned by a trust, and anchored by corporate tenants that provide work for the area.
Each village would be owned and governed by a trust, which would use the money to buy up agricultural land along the train route and build a master-planned community. As in Bournville, the trust would earn revenue from rents—residential, commercial, and agricultural—only this time there would be no private property sales eroding incomes, improving upon the Cadbury model. Profits would be used to pay back investors, capped at a 4% return, as well as maintain and beautify the city and public garden spaces. Most importantly, revenues would “provide a large surplus for other purposes, such as old-age pensions or insurance against accident and sickness.”
This idea was radical, and among my favorite of the industrial welfare reforms proposed at the time. According to Howard’s model, the village becomes our social benefactor, not the national government. And the benefits residents receive—schools, hospitals, retirement homes, etc.—are funded through rental income received locally by the village, not national tax dollars. Because the community is governed by a charitable trust, it autonomously governs in the interest of the community. Each village provides for its own, taking on the business of running cities and navigating social reforms, which the government had so far proved inept at doing.
Here we see the benefits of capitalism providing the welfare of socialism, to a village that self-governs as in anarchism, through a trust that pays for it all with land rents. “To achieve these desirable ends, I have taken a leaf out of the books of each type of reformer and bound them together by a thread of practicability,” Howard says in his book.
Property rights, he realized, are often more powerful than government rights, and he aimed to take advantage of that. “Garden City is in a greatly superior position,” he said, “for, by stepping as a quasi public body into the rights of a private landlord, it becomes at once clothed with far larger powers for carrying out the will of the people than are possessed by other local bodies, and thus solves to a large extent the problem of local self-government.”
That local government becomes much more important than the national one in his scheme. “The rents were,” he says, “not to be levied by a central government far removed from contact with the people, but by the very parish (in my scheme the municipality) in which the people reside.”
Amazingly, Howard didn’t just write about this idea; he tried it out.
