Ebenezer Howard is considered to be one of the founding fathers of urban planning and with good reason. He invented the garden city, wrote a very important book and his ideas are often revisited as a solution to urban problems even today. In the United Kingdom, all of the main political parties have expressed a desire to adopt Howard’s garden city model as a possible answer to housing shortages in the country. Their enthusiasm has even made its way into the National Planning Policy Framework and in 2014, new plans for a Garden City were unveiled by George Osbourne, the former Chancellor of the exchequer in Ebbsfleet, Kent. The Town is starting to take shape today as it slowly gets towards its target of 15000 new homes and 32000 new jobs by the year 2035.
It is actually possible to find Garden Cities in every continent which highlights just how far Howard’s ideas managed to travel. You can find Garden Cities in developing countries too but this is less common, and it is far less common to hear Howard’s ideas discussed in the context of very poor countries despite the fact that there is a lot that these countries can learn from his ideas. Howard was from England, and in his time, big cities like London and Manchester weren’t very nice places to live in while the rural parts of the country, although very beautiful and pleasant, couldn’t offer the opportunities and convenience of big cities. His idea was simple, to build places that could offer the beauty of the countryside and the convenience of city life and he called these places ‘Garden Cities’. These would be planned cities, of limited size and they would be surrounded by agricultural land (green belt).
The other aspect of Howard’s model was regarding the social organization of these Garden Cities. French Author Jean-Yves Tizot believes that this was actually the main focus of Howard’s work saying that it was a “misunderstanding” to assume that spatial planning issues were the main aspect of his plan. A misunderstanding that he says “stands in the way of an honest apprehension of Howard’s original intentions”. Given the fact that only one of the thirteen chapters of Howard’s book dealt with planning issues with the rest being dedicated to the financial, management and organizational aspects of the project, he is probably right.
It is the social element of the Garden City Project which is most relevant to countries like Somalia in my opinion due to the similarities between the United Kingdom in the 19th century and Somalia in the present day. Governments are expected to build, organise and maintain the places we live in today but it wasn’t always this way. Urban planning issues weren’t a top priority in nineteenth century Britain much like they aren’t a top priority in Somalia today which is understandable given the country’s current situation. According to the Unhabitat, which is the United Nations program for human settlements and sustainable urban development, “the Somali urban landscape is largely ruled by unregulated black market principles. Almost everything is up for grabs (or at least for sale) … towns are a bundle of casually, haphazardly laid-out buildings, and a multitude of users fight over the same unorganized public spaces”. Again, this isn’t all that different from the United Kingdom in 19th century Britain where the government’s “laissez-faire” attitude towards planning issues saw poorly developed housing and overcrowded urban areas that were filled with ill-health and vice.
So, in 1898 Howard wrote Garden Cities of Tomorrow which is arguably the single most important book on planning that was ever written, he held seminars up and down the country to promote his ideas, and he formed the Garden City Association which still exists today. Through his efforts Howard managed to raise over a quarter of a million pounds (approximately 6,000,000 in today’s money) to build two of the eight garden cities he first proposed (in Letchworth and later in Welwyn) and he managed to do this without the help of government and technology. In fact, he was very fortunate to have had a telephone since it didn’t even exist twenty years or so before his book was published.
With these similarities in mind, might it be possible then for the citizens of Somalia and the diaspora alike to pool their resources together just like they did in Howard’s time to try to solve some of the urban issues that face the country today? To be clear, I do not mean to say that we should start building garden cities in Somalia, while that might be nice to see. What I am talking about here is how we can go about solving the many urban and infrastructural problems that the country is currently wrestling with and this is where Ebenezer Howard comes in.
With the resources we have at our disposal today, it may seem unimaginable that a middle-aged man was able to traipse across the land actualising his dream without the use of the internet, let alone a mobile phone or social media. There are approximately 4.5 billion social media users worldwide at the time of writing this piece which is more than double the global population in the year 1900. These numbers suggest, on paper at least, that what Howard did is more easily achieved today than it was in his time. What’s more, crowdfunding is already a common practice today and some of these crowdfunding platforms are dedicated specifically to projects like this.
The Somali diaspora’s unwavering dedication to its country is also a positive sign that a project like this could actually work. The diaspora remains committed to the promotion of educational, health and infrastructural programs in the country. Many of them actually return to their country to provide support and expertise and every year approximately two billion dollars is sent in the form of remittances. Admittedly, difficulties will be inevitable to avoid but has there ever been any growth without sacrifice? Not only will the country and its citizens directly benefit from better housing, improved roads and overall better infrastructure. If planned correctly, projects like these could snowball into something much bigger and we could see more involvement from the Somali government once it is in a position to do so because this is exactly what happened with Howard’s ideas.
Through his Garden Cities, Howard inspired the creation of the first garden suburb in Hampstead although this isn’t what he had originally planned. Despite this, the Hampstead Garden Suburb did get the support of parliament who endorsed the idea through Hampstead Garden Suburb Act in 1906. This wasn’t the end of Howard’s influence. The Letchworth and Hampstead initiatives were the main inspiration behind the 1909 Housing and Town Planning Act which was the first major piece of planning legislation in the United Kingdom and the foundation for planning law in the country. Howard’s ideas also helped to influence Sir Patrick Abercrombie who was the man behind the Greater London Plan of 1947. Sir Patrick Abercrombie who was described as “the man who created London” helped to rebuild the city after it was ‘blitzed’ in the second world war.
There is no reason something like this can’t happen in Somalia too. Garden Suburbs were not in Howard’s plans at all. It might even be said that they contradicted some of his ideas but the creation of the Hampstead Garden Suburb and its endorsement by the government was largely down to his efforts. So too was the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 which helped to improve the lives of millions of people. The convenience of modern technology today means that we don’t even need a grand figure like Ebenezer Howard to write a new book or to create some sort of master plan, but we do need to study his methods so that we are able to replicate some of his achievements and maybe even build on them. It was Howard’s perseverance and hard work which helped to bring about legislation that we are still benefiting from today. So why then, can the same path not be trodden in Somalia or in any other developing nation for that matter? We’re not in need of an Ebenezer Howard resurrection but rather a resurrection of his principles of planning and persistence and action because these are the principles that will help bring about lasting change.