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The central illustration in Ebenezer Howard's innovative urban design plan, 'Garden City', possesses the elegant symmetries of a mandala - a concentric pattern in which circling spheres of human communities are arranged evenly along radial lines as if in harmonised planetary orbit. Created in 1902 as a solution to the congestion and environmental ill-effects of industrialised London, Howard's elegantly abstract diagram also pictures an innovative ideology: the 'Garden City', in both name and image, proposes a futuristic model of urban collectivism based on implicitly natural ('garden') principles, what we might call a mode of yeoman communalism designed to replace, or perhaps more correctly, emplace the offensive congeries (in Howard's view) of inner city London. |
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