GARDEN CITIES

F. J. Osborn, Welwyn, 1945

The problems which underlay the research into the cultural roots of the Garden City are directly connected with the problem of its definition and the possibility of answering the question: what is a Garden City?

In fact, although Ebenezer Howard devoted a whole book to the explanation of his sociological theories on town planning and to the description of his settling project and although two cities have been built according to the principles outlined in his book, as F. J. Osborn writes, "the history of the book and its repercussions are full of contradictions"1.

Osborn himself, Howard’s follower and close collaborator, makes his contribution to clarify the extent of these contradictions by stating that the word Garden City "has on the whole been given in general a meaning which is completely different and even the opposite of the author’s definition of it"2.

Howard’s close collaborators in this venture were already aware of the widespread misunderstanding, not to say distortion, of the original concept of the Garden City in 1945, paradoxically soon after the immediate success of the project on a vast scale.

After publishing Tomorrow, a peaceful path to real reform3 (1898) Howard was already able to found the "Garden City Association" in London in 1899; in 1902 a "Pioneer Company" chose the Letchworth ground to be the site of the first experiment of Garden City and in 1903 the "First Garden City Ltd." was registered as anonymous society and Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker were given the task of drawing up the design of the new city.

This undertaking of both a social and business nature was soon to show its significance. Parker and Unwin designed the Hampstead Garden Suburb in 1907 and in 1919, as the first Garden City grew up to 10,000 inhabitants, Howard purchased the land to found a second city, Welwyn, entrusting Louis de Soissons with its town plan.

The extraordinary power of the Garden City concept and its influence on the development of town planning in the 20th century can be understood by comparing this experience fully matured in a free, competitive market of a capitalistic type and the time taken by Howard’s "utopia" to become reality in the form of the attempts made by some totalitarian regimes such as the fascist in Italy and the national socialist in Germany to build new cities.

However, the Garden City concept, just due to its success which was so crucial as to put into question the various theories which implied the need of an authoritarian power to found a new city, spread together with a parallel distortion of the original model which added to the initial condition of "objective" ambiguity, creating a whole series of interpretative difficulties when the search for an archetype began.

There is an obvious need to agree on the concept and to clarify its meaning in order to avoid the sort of misinterpretations already pointed out by Osborn in 1945.

To understand what a Garden City is we must go back to our original source: Howard’s book4. We soon notice that the book includes only a scrupulous description of the social and economic features of the project and unlike the majority of treatises, from those of the Renaissance about the ideal city up to Ledoux, seems to intentionally avoid5 all project drawings although just a few sketches added only in the 1902 edition can be found.

If, on the other hand, we look at the first settlement conceived and founded by Howard, Lectchworth, a great number of morphological features stand out which due to the influence created by their presence in the territory acquired great significance in creating a collective image of the garden city.

It is from these two sources, the book and its practical execution, that we begin our search for possible archetypes of the garden city.

The book, or foundation and polycentrism.

"The reader should picture 6,000 acres (2,428 hectares) of land joined into a single land property reserved for agriculture and bought on the free market for 40 pounds per acre (...) The property is legally registered in the names of four people who hold a solid position as well as being undoubtedly honest and upright. They are its trustees in that they answer first of all for the owners of the bond and secondly for the inhabitants of the garden city, the Magnet Country-City they intend to build on the same land.

The Garden City which was to build close to the middle of the 6,000 acres, covered a area of 1,000 acres (105 hectares) (...) and could have a circular shape with a radius of 1,240 yards (about 1,200 metres).

(...) If we ask a friend who is with us during this exploration how many people live in this city his answer will be that 30,000 people live in the city itself, 2,000 live in the rural area and that the urban area includes 5,500 building plots with an average surface of 20 by 130 feet (6 by 40 metres) the minimal space allotted for each being 20 by 100 feet (6 by 30 metres)"6.

Howard’s account goes on for the entire first chapter with a detailed analysis of the morphologic features of the new city but these first paragraphs already give an idea of the guidelines of the project and offer useful hints which help identify references which could possibly belong to the western town planning. His account leaves out various examples of villages built after the industrial revolution and tries to solve the huge problem of social housing such as Le Chaux-aux-Fonds in France, Kunsztow and Strykow in Poland and Port Sunlight in England. The history of town planning must therefore be approached by looking for roots which go beyond and less tied to a single event, even though it was crucial, such as the industrial capitalistic development of the 18th and 19th century and by developing a tendency to constantly plan, when considering the relationship between urban settlement and rural areas.

First of all the foundation city

Howard’s new city fits into the tradition of cities planned and built as a response to a demographic increase or as a desire to improve the productive and defense requirements of the territory. Here, the garden city is seen as the environmental development of the Greek and Roman colony, of the French bastide, of the terra murata in Florence, of the Spanish villa nueva, the Polish Nowe Miasto, the German neue stadt, the Czeck Novi Mesto, until the city of Spanish colonial Central and South America.

Indeed, one of the main concepts of western town planning, which in the course of the centuries has proved to be one of the most successful both economically and strategically, is that of a city directly linked to rural areas so as to free the new settlements from the mother city.

In Howard’s project the new city is expected to expand more than most other European foundation cities apart from those intended to become capital cities such as Cracow, Manheim, St. Petersbourg and Helsinki. However, it must be emphasized that the demographic and economic conditions in Europe and the United Kingdom at the end of the 19th century, after the latter had consolidated a commercial and industrial empire, were completely different from those which existed during the colonization of Eastern Europe by the Teutonic Order or the South-West of France after the Hundred Years’ War. As a matter of fact, at the time, an area of 400 hectares was considered to be extremely large for a city and very few of the major and most prosperous like Paris and Prague reached such a size at the peak of their economic and military power7 - Bruges 430 ha, Louvain 410 ha, Bologna 431 ha, Brussels 449 ha. Having reached that peak, their size tended to remain unchanged for centuries even when their population decreased and their political power declined8.

The territory of a bastide rarely exceeded 25-30 ha9 and only in our times in specific socio-economic conditions, has increased its population to 5,000-6,000 inhabitants by using up the empty spaces inside its boundary walls. Its population density generally remains considerably lower than that of big cities (60-80 inhabitants per hectare) due to the persistence of its parcelled structure and typology.

Like Howard’s city, medieval foundation cities were based on urban blocks in which building sites 6 by 30-40 meters were most frequent. The type of building generally consisted of two floors and a ground floor which often had a porch and was used for storage and commercial activities and it always included an area which was left unbuilt, frequently used as urban garden.

Howard’s concept and the European colonization experience of the Middle Ages which was achieved through the foundation of new cities have certain points in common. These are: the idea of a new city separated from the mother city and set in a rural area; the morphology of a clearly delimited city built according to an individual parcelled structure which could also be serial, and in a controlled density.

Undoubtedly, the ideal city of the Renaissance resembles Howard’s design due to their common "utopian" features which however were to become in both cases most real. However the interest writers of treatises have shown in the city itself, as an autonomous organism almost apart from the territory in which it is placed, points out a basic difference with the interest the English theorist has given the mutual relations between city and countryside.

However, among the cities designed and built during the Renaissance, one city stands out as being exceptionally interesting because of its similarities with Howard’s Garden City: Freudenstadt10.

Designed by Shickhard in 1599, this city in the Württemberg mountains is still almost intact today like a kind of archetype of Howard’s concept, strongly inspired by the principles of an organic and independent community typical of the reformative European thought of the late 19th century. This new city designed according to the technical and hygienic criteria of an enlightened mind, is one which exists in harmony with the natural environment and draws its resources rationally and efficiently from it. It is a city with a low population density and a square with arcades and endowed with trees like a park. Its main public buildings - the council, the market, the evangelical church, the meeting hall, the post office and the police station - are placed in the middle or on its boundaries. It lies within a perfectly planned 200 ha. square-shaped perimeter and, following Renaissance geometry, a 50 ha. park-square is the heart of four 50 ha. districts defined by cross-roads running through the square itself.

The use of building typologies serially repeated according to a congruous project and of a maximum height of two or three storeys makes Wurttemberg’s ideal city morphologically consistent with Howard’s model and makes up for the differences due to the lack of undeveloped green space in Freudenstadt and to its size (15 by 15 m).

Among the cities built during the Renaissance and Baroque periods one of the most emblematic examples of how Howard’s concept took root in western town planning is the king’s or prince’s city of residence. It is in fact through the foundation of new cities designed to be capital cities of small states or the residence of enlightened kings that the process of rationalization and improvement of settlement conditions initiated by Renaissance speculation finds an oportuniy for research.

It is interesting to notice how Unwin himself in his Town planning in practice11 often refers to Karlsruhe as a model example for the new city.

Here again a large park-square is found in the middle of the urban design where blocks of houses defined by the radials developed from the Margravial residence are divided into lots and one-family serially joined units are largely used.

Another large sequence of open public areas arranged like a park is a feature of the centre of Ludwigslust in Mecklenburg12, a city founded as a rural community during the first half of the 18th century and constructed under the guidance of an enlightened prince. The green space here represents the linking element which in an orderly manner defines a hierarchy of powers: the oval square opposite the palace (1726) and the big square-shaped square which leads to the church (1765). Along this sequence of open spaces finds place the theory of one-family houses with one or two storeys, on long narrow sites, of a community which through its form of settlement - an ordered parcelled structure as well as a similar division of the agricultural land - reveals its search for an ideal relationship with nature following the tradition of the typical rural ‘foundations’ of the German cultural area which include some remarkable examples such as Karlsruhe, a village in Slesia.

Among these experiences of a garden city, where the reformative intent of a society, even under a feudal type of regime, is accompanied by an attempt to build a new type of city characterized not only by a rational and ordered arrangement but also by a general lessening of the density of the settlement, the most interesting example is Versailles.

There we find the first attempt to solve on a vast scale the overpopulation problems of a European capital city like Paris through the completion of an entirely independent new city inspired by hygienic and rational criteria. It was an attempt to create a model of city and community in which a newly discovered relationship with nature and an economic structure freed from the ties of the old urban areas could be the means of recreating a society torn by the 1645-1653 internal conflicts as well as to strengthen the king’s authority.

As Jean Castex, Patrick Celeste and Philippe Panerai emphasized, Louis XIV’s garden city presents many common aspects with Howard’s programme13. First of all the problem of demographic control and secondly those of site and land property. Two diverging yet related phenomena are at the basis of the foundation of the new city: the doubling of the population of Paris between 1590 and 1637 which reached an estimated number of between 400,000 and 600,000 inhabitants and the simultaneous moving away of the countryside around Ile de France due to the Frond wars and the 1630-1633 and 1660-1661 famines.

The foundation policy of a new city coincides with a wide program of re-distribution of the population over the territory in order to better utilize it.

The Sun-King, more than two centuries before the English theorist realized perfectly that a huge town planning operation such as the creation of a new city at less than 20 kilometers from a strong magnet like Paris, could be successful only if provided with a territory free from pre-existing buildings and resorting to a number of fiscal incentives.

To meet the first requirement, Louis XIV continued with the acquisition of land started by Louis XIII14 and embarked upon a radical transformation of the medieval rural landscape by pulling down churches and villages and by transferring their populations little by little15. As a response to the second problem a free building site concession and a mortgage exemption were granted in 1671 and 1672 respectively. The king urbanized the land, established the town plan and granted a settling right which enabled the keeping of land property undivided as well as preventing real estate speculations.

The garden city was conceived as early as1670 by a group of designers including Le Nôtre, Le Vau, Francois d’Orbay and Robert de Cotte while the plan of the Parc aux Cerfs area was Hardouin Mansart’s. A collective work then, like Letchworth and Hampstead16.

The new city is organized into three distinct parts around a trident centerd on the royal castle: the Ville Neuve in the North, the Parc aux Cerfs area in the South and in the middle the trident where, like in Howard’s model, the main public buildings are to be found.

Remarkable attention is given to establishing a relationship between public open areas and urban blocks in order to provide plenty of roads, squares, parks and gardens. Beyond the huge Place d’Armes which extends out three-cornered in front of the castle, the three avenues forming the leading structure of the new city are provided with four rows of trees in sections which far exceed the usual size found in traditional cities: 93.60m for the avenue de Paris, 78m for the avenue de St. Cloud and 70m for the avenue de Sceaux.

Two main squares of the cross-roads type, one octagonal (Place Hoche) and one square (Marché), define the hierarchy of the Ville Neuve while the Parc-aux-Cerfs area was designed following a pretentious model in which, in the center of a rectangular composition, we find a square Place Royale at the cross-roads of two main streets which divide the city into four parts with a square in the middle of each. The original establishment and the desire to create an urban environment rich in open areas, with a low density, are still visible although marred by the square opposite St. Louis cathedral and by the presence of another square placed on the southern boundary of the main axis of Place Royale (nowadays a market).

On the whole, from the castle in the west to avenue de Montboron in the east, the city extends over about 130 ha. 50 of which are occupied by the central trident. The population, including the residents of the castle and the troops (10,000), reached up to 25,000 inhabitants17 in 1715, figures which are again very close to Howard’s program.

The garden city of Versailles was built according to a project which was defined so far as to specify even the building models. The inhabitants of the new city were exempted from all personal taxes and were granted a building site on condition that they would start building within a year. The income obtained from the land, personal property and a potential sale were exempted from taxes and mortgages. In exchange the grantees had to pay a rent proportional to the extension of the land and had to conform to a given building model.

The garden city foresaw a complex bureaucratic machine which assured congruity to its town plan: a Surintendant des Finances, a Surintendant des Bâtiments and a Grand Voyer were the officials appointed to check the city being built-up.

From a morphological point of view, the pavilion type represents the reference point and the mould of the urban composition. The plan provides for the building of pavilions along the three avenues (de St. Cloud, de Paris, de Sceaux) and in certain places in the layout of the area: at the square corners, at the top of main streets and in the middle of oblique sides of squares.

The pavilion of the garden city expands on a site with a 45m wide road frontage 55m deep and it is placed on the central part of the road side. It has a square plan and a 16m side following a definite formal model, the plan of which used to be enclosed with legal permission documents: two floors with a mansard made in brick with stone underlining corners and reliefs and two rows of windows on the road side and three on the side orthogonal to the street on which the front door opens symmetrically.

In addition to the basic one-family model, the urban code of the ville neuve also includes a second type of pavilion-like designed to accommodate two families. Devised as an element of a more general urban form this half pavilion was simply obtained by dividing a whole pavilion into two separate parts along the symmetrical axis of the site orthogonal to the street. This division is also stressed inside the property by the presence of a boundary wall.

This variation on the theme, true anticipation of the Letchworth two-family cottage, made it possible to have two 22m wide by 55m deep sites joined in such a way that from the outside the passer-by could see the same modular pace and the same built-unbuilt rhythm of the original pavilion.

The formal and typologic unity of the parcelled structure of the garden city is completed by a series of multi-family sites with a 16,50m wide road frontage and by a special type of housing with a shop on the ground floor and a flat on the first floor meant for tradesmen.

Versailles is therefore, from all points of view, the first important conscious experiment of a garden city, whatever meaning we ascribe to the term: a city placed in a huge garden, a city of gardens, a city with its own garden, etc. An experiment which, just like Howard’s model two centuries later, finds an obstacle in its success. The new city begins to take root in the territory after the first difficulties faced in trying to persuade an urban population to move to the country and to participate in an innovative town planning workshop where the traditional elements of the urban and natural environment tended to blend.

At first the Ville neuve sites filled up, later, with more effort, the second area, Parc-aux-Cerfs, filled up with the king’s servants, government official’s widows, contractors and noblemen. The economy of the new city underwent a strong surge when the court was definitely transferred in 1682 and its attraction grew in geometrical progression. All this, together with the great flexibility due to its parcelled structure which allowed for a progressive density growth of the site depending on economic and social needs, distorted Louis XIV’s original project.

Under his successor, Louis XV, Versailles gradually abandoned the unitarian and scenographical features of the ambitious project, synthesis of city and countryside. The formal unity of the pavilions isolated within the sites, with their courts of honor and gardens orderly arranged, was gradually altered first by the introduction of a number of additional buildings within the site and then by new buildings on the road frontage designed to become trading areas as well as to give the road frontage formal continuity. This way, the whole body of buildings created an inner court connected with the street by a sheltered arched route and the garden itself, placed at the back of the site, was replaced by another additional structure. Finally even the original pavilion itself was demolished and reconstructed as a building with flats.

The garden city disappeared, the city triumphed18.

The built-up city or nature and picturesque style

A second definite source in the search for possible precedents and sources of Howard’s Garden City is represented by the substantial building inheritance left by Letchworth and Welwyn, the two cities personally founded by him, as well as Hampstead Garden Suburb.

Although a more detailed analysis of these examples is left to a specific study, their most important and "evident" common features will be underlined here.

In the first place, what a visitor first notices in all three examples is the constant and absolutely dominant presence of greenery: lawns of public and private gardens, trees which embellish streets and reach out of properties. A second aspect is the search for scenographical solutions inspired by a combination of the typical axial and symmetrical features of classical compositions with the picturesque style peculiar to the collective imagery of medieval cities. A final aspect is the vernacular quality of the buildings which mostly feature aspects derived from the Anglo-Saxon architectural tradition.

The creation of the garden city image and its spread as a town planning model on very different scales is mainly due to these types of artistic elements on a local scale.

A detail drawn from a large and ambitious general project of social reform and urban development; the part meant firstly to represent and later to substitute the whole; the cottage drawn the structure of public areas which should include and justify it; the winding street lined with trees which isolates residents from social life. They are denied both the vitality of the city and the reassuring customs of village life; a whole body of one-family houses, at times joined for economic reasons, scattered over the territory without a structure of public areas, without a center; a city that from "magnet" becomes appendix: this is the paradoxical, even if perhaps cynically foreseeable, outcome of Ebenezer Howard’s massive project.

Nevertheless these elements also come from far away. They express a particular culture, old habits and traditions, a lasting source in the history of town planning even though side by side with the centralizing tendencies of industrial growth and production means improvement.

As a matter of fact, the development of a town planning model, which combined the need to live in the city with the better qualities of the natural environment, dates back to the first squares designed and built by Inigo Jones at the beginning of the 17th century in Great Britain. The method is well known19 for its efficiency and genius: the main and most magnificent area of the city, the square, is enriched with a central garden so that every time the residents open the window or the door they are given the feeling of living in the country.

This expedient is generally inspired by a practical outlook where the success of the entrepreneurial undertaking by creating profit becomes the only criterion used and where the need to sell the sites in order to avoid the failure of the speculation and the ruin of the undertaker, represents a valid incentive to develop an attractive project in a free trade competitive market.

It is well known how this experiment was met with rapid success and became the morphological matrix of London’s urban growth. According to this viewpoint, Wood’s introduction (1725-1750) in Bath of new formal typologies such us the Circus and the Crescent, represents an enrichment of a vocabulary which can be used for more complex and meaningful urban designs.

However, the real novelty in Bath’s expansion project and its importance for the development of the garden city town planning model consists in the idea of a city which grows organically and continuously while exploiting the environmental features of the site and seeking an interaction with nature which allows it to overcome the traditional "closure" concept. This idea inspired all John Nash’s work in Regent’s Park.

In this connection, the Royal Crescent is of great importance and it can be said that somehow it even goes beyond what the garden-city designers aimed at in their search: the perspective drawn by Unwin to outline the boundary of Hampstead Garden Suburb20 and the fact that it was presented at the same time as Rothenburg walls demonstrate a definite will to include the new city design within a solid tradition and precise settlement rules of which the boundary concept constitutes the necessary hinge.

James Craig’s (1767) New Town in Edinburgh represents the first real attempt to knowingly build a garden city utilizing all the formal inventory of the English and European urban tradition21.

There are many common points between the two experiences and a visitor who ventures on a comparative visit will still notice today some considerable and clear relationships.

The New Town still appears like a city apart, completely different from the old city: like Howard’s garden city, it is divided by a huge natural area, the North Loch, today transformed into a railway valley and by the city of the Royal Mile and of the castle dear to Robert Louis Stevenson’s romantic ambience. Its structure is created by an extraordinary sequence of squares, circuses and crescents besides other interesting variations on the theme, such us the octagonal Murray Place which is the evolved environmental version of the Parisian Place Vendôme.

Public green space and a series of two- or three-storey houses built on narrow and long sites the dimensions of which are close to Howard’s 6 by 40m, strongly remind us of some parts of Letchworth or Hampstead.

The expansion system of the New Town itself, having been established by Craig, follows the principle, theorized by Howard two centuries later, of separating new and old areas which is achieved with huge green areas.

What we find at an environment level cannot be found at the level of economic organization and land property division although the traditional Lease system22 is a leitmotiv for both operations.

If it is, then, possible to link, via a series of interruptions, the Lincoln Inn’s Field with the centre of Letchworth, another interesting example of the Garden City morphological model certainly comes from the peculiar experience of beguinages in some cities in Flanders.

The beguinage seems to have all the morphological features of the Garden City. Its streets and squares and the dominant shapes of churches seem to have come from Unwin’s perspectives23.

The houses, built in serial have in fact mainly two floors, sloping roofs and small gardens opening on the street as a filter between public and private space.

The streets in the beguinage are almost never straight or orthogonal. The free composition typical of medieval villages spreads out without a pre-arranged plan, form an environment marked by the presence of a main garden-like square opposite the main church and by a number of secondary small squares placed near cross-roads and public buildings.

A small city within the city, with a precise boundary represented by a continuous wall with few guarded entrances; an "urban village" rich in green space and a parcelled structure which privileges the individual ensuring a clear relationship between community and private space.

An economically independent small city with an autonomous and efficient productive system specialized in producing quality hand-made products.

Classifyable under two different categories, the "Square" as in Bruges, Dendermonde and Antwerpen and the "Village" as in Louvain, Gent Sint Amandsberg and Lier, beguinages represent, even in the texture of the facade materials, the dark brick front typical of the Flemish building tradition, the true archetype of the Garden City24.

NOTES

__________________________________________________

1 see F. J. OSBORN, Introduction, in EBENEZER HOWARD, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, Faber and Faber, London 1902;

2 see ibid.

3 first edition of the book containing the theory that the Garden City can be utilised to overcome the city-country dualism and to create a social and town planning design which would ameliorate living conditions in cities undergoing a increasing industrialization process.

4 about misinterpretations of the original source, see again what Osborn said: "It is a paradox, as Lewis Mumford says, that Unwin’s work (after his taking part in the planning of the first Garden-City in Letchworth) should have led to that form of universal suburban development which, as Howard’s follower, he disapproved of on principle";

5 see EBENEZER HOWARD, op. cit. p. 10: "Diagram 2 is a planimetry of the whole council area with the city in the middle; diagram 3, which represents a part or sector of the city, will be useful to follow the description of the city itself - it is however only an approximate description from which we shall diverge somewhat quite a lot"; in diagram 2 it is also specified that the plan cannot be drawn before choosing the area, 1985;

6 see ibid;

7 let us consider Rome in the Middle Ages. It extended for about 100 hectares and the numerous basilicas within the Roman walls, St. Peter's included, were actually worship places scattered in the countryside;

8 in some cities like Bologna or Bruges, the largest wall belt was built during the 14th century, and only during the 20th century these cities were involved in an expansion process. In between these two periods, demographically, there was a decrease due to many reason: the decline of the harbour of the Flemish city, the loss of political independence in the Padana plane;

9 the largest bastides were: Rabastens, Marciac, Fleurance, Sainte-Foi-la-Grande, Grenade-sur-Garonne, Beaumont-de-Lomagne, Carcassonne; see F. Divorne, B. Gendre, B. Laverne, P. Panerai, Les bastides. Essai sur la regularité, AAM ed. Bruxelles, 1985; Societé Academique d’Arquitecture, Les bastides du sud-ovest, Diagram Editeur, Toulouse 1990;

10 ALBERT ERICH BRINCKMANN, Platz und monument Als Künstlerishes Formproblem, Wasmuth A. G., Berlin 1923; by the same author see also: Die Baukunst des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion M.B.H., Berlin-Neubabelsberg 1915; see also: ERNST EGLI, Geschichtedes Städtebaues , Eugen Reutsch Verlag, Zürich und Stuttgart 1967; KARL GRUBER, Die Gestalt der Deutschen Stadt, Verlag Georg D.W. Callwey, München 1952; ROMAN HEILIGENTHAL, Deutschen Städtebau, Carl Winter, Heidelberg 1921; FRITZ ROTHSTEIN, Shöne Plätze, Leipzig 1967; Joseph Stübben, Der Städtebau, Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig/Wiesbaden 1980 (original edit. 1890);

11 see R. Unwin, Town Planning in Practice;

12 see GERD DETTMANN, Johann Joachim Bush. Der Baumeister von Ludwigslus, Rostock 1920;

13 see J. CASTEX, P. CELESTE, P. PANERAI, Lecture d’une ville: Versailleis , Editions du Moniteur, Paris 1980;

14 note, in fact, that Louis XIII initiated a gradual acquisition of land belonging to different owners and purchased the "signoria" of Versailles from Albert de Gondi in 1632. It was not then the case of founding a city on an already consolidated and available site, which would in itself be worthy of note, but that of a conscious plan which encompassed all the problems typical of founding a new city such as acquiring the land;

15 Trianon and its church were demolished in 1668, the old village in Versailles in 1673, the church of Saint Julien in 1683 and the village Choisy-aux-Boeufs between 1683 and 1685;

16 in both cases the procedure is based on the compilation of a guide plan with detailed regulations about settlement typology and architecture, even great architects like Hardouin Mansart and Lutyens have been able to express their talents adhering to this model. It is then the case of an important design where town planning and architecture blend in order to ensure the founding of an organic and hierarchically arranged city;

17 data drawn from the Narbonne report compiled at the beginning of Louis XV’s reign which show how the new city had already reached the density of cities like Rennes, Tours, Grenoble and Reims;

18 in 1744 its population density reached to 50,000 inhabitants which is the same as cities like Toulouse, München, Bologna and Rome;

19 see PAUL ZUCKER, Town and Square. From the Agorà to the Village Green, The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge Massachusetts 1972;

20 it is significant that the name of the settlement refers to a town planning typology different from the city: the suburb. It might be useful to return to the concept clearly stated by Osborn in 1948 with regard to the terms "Garden Suburb, Garden Village": "In these expressions the word 'Garden' only means a well designed whole with open space. It is a mistake - also made by many authoritative people - to describe a garden-suburb as a suburb 'built according to the principles of the garden city'". The word suburb describes the external band of a big city or urban agglomeration which keeps expanding and implies that this area is not separated from the city by agricultural land, in op. cit.;

21 see A. J. YOUNGSON, The making of classical Edinburgh 1750-1840, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1966;

22 the term refers to a feature of the British right of ownership, as specified by Giorgio Bellavitis in his terminological note to the Italian translation of Howard’s book (see La città giardino del futuro, Calderini, Bologna 1972), "it refers to any contract through which the party (lessor or landlord) having the freehold of a personal property gives the other party (lessee or tenant) a lease-hold on the same personal property which is lower than a freehold".

23 see RAYMOND UNWIN, op. cit.;

24 see HANS VOGTS, Die Begijnhöfe als vorbilder für den städte- und kleinwohungsbau, in "Der Städtebau" N. 2/3, 1917.

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