It represents the first successful modern attempt to exploit these principles for whole settlements, the success of which is attributed to the theoretical ideas and practical promotion of a City of London stenographer, Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928). His vision, as outlined in his Garden cities of tomorrow (1902, first published in 1898 under a different title), saw them as combining the social, economic and cultural benefits of big-city living with the advantages to the individual of a more healthy rural environment. Each city would accommodate some 32,000 people on a 6000 acre site, planned according to a concentric land-use pattern in which residential and commercial land were segregated. Openness was injected through wide boulevards, low-density development and public parks within, with farmland and GREEN BELT beyond. On a city reaching its capacity, additional growth was directed to further garden cities, so creating a system of planned centres around their parent metropolis, the whole being interconnected by efficient rail and road links.

In 1899 Howard founded the Garden City Association which, four years later, bought a 3918 acre site in Hertfordshire on which Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin designed the world's first garden city, Letchworth, only one-third of which became built upon, the rest remaining variously as open space. A second followed at Welwyn, also in Hertfordshire, in 1920.

The garden city movement showed how DECENTRALIZATION could contribute to the planned improvement of congested urban centres, a theme taken up in Britain's postwar NEW TOWN and URBAN RENEWAL programmes, while the Garden City Association led to the founding of the Town and Country Planning Association in 1918, still a potent pressure group in British urban and regional planning.

These ideas have also been adopted internationally, and although settlements called 'garden cities' outside Britain show variations from the Howard model, high-quality residential environments, low densities and greenness are still central themes. Both in Britain and elsewhere, too, similar ideas have been adopted on a smaller scale in the intra-urban development of garden villages and garden suburbs. While the debt that these owe to Howard's ideas is a point of debate, it is clear that Howard in his turn was influenced by the utopian ideas of Victorian urban thinkers and philanthropic industrialists.