Methodologv/Pro@zey to Prediction 169

detail than we were able to do in our pilot exercise.

The exercise of mapping group views will only be done periodically (perhaps every two years), and it needs to be allowed for within the organisation of a policy group. If planning exercises are continuously displaced by more pressing concerns, their value will be greatly diminished.

The value of the workbook At its best, the workbook developed here would be used by staff to review the issues they had previously defined, to note changes in their views, and perhaps to consider specific decisions within this larger framework. We do not feel that we accomplished this goal in this study, largely because compiling the workbook did not blend well enough with their daily activities. This weakness, of course, relates to the need for organisational support for such activities. However, it also points to the importance of active participation by members of the decision-making

group. The initial interviews with each staff member were an important part of establishing this communication link, but this initial contact was not fully maintained. In the end, the staff will judge the exercise by how well it helps them in their jobs. This doesn’t mean that every decision taken will now be the right one, but at least the context in which decisions are made should be more fully understood.

Conclusion

The process described here was a pilot effort which can provide a useful guide for similar attempts to understand the collective perceptions of a decision- making group. The experience suggests that such a mapping process is possible, but only through a combination of good planning and organisational support. Similar’ exercises should improve the methods available to decision-making groups, in different environments and with varied responsibilities, as they attempt to think more comprehensively about the future.

From Prophecy A serialised survey of the movement

to Prediction of ideas, developments in predictive fiction, and first attempts to forecast the future scientifically.

11. Plans, policies and populations

James Milligan

IN 1898 Ebenezer Howard, a short- hand writer who had worked as a clerk and as a Hansard reporter, published Tomorrow-A Peaceful Path to Real Ref0rm.l Behind and around him lay the vast workings of the industrial revolu-

James Milligan is Senior Lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning, at the University of Strath- Clyde, Scotland. He was previously a senior planning officer in city and new-town planning departments at Hull, Glasgow, and Craigavon (Northern Ireland), UK.

tion, explosive population growth, and the unprecedented development of new industrial towns based on water, coal, and iron ore resources. The political and historical landscape had been reshaped by that revolution, by the American and French revolutions, and by the fierce if less traumatic struggles of British reformers to contain or control the profit-driven forces of change. Ahead of him, but perhaps sensed by him as possibilities, lay the great world

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170 From Pro&y to. Prediction

wars, the Russian and Chinese revolu- tions and the further development of industry into new technological forms based on cleaner power sources, less locationally fixed bases, and widening markets.

Howard prefaced his original edition with a quotation from John Richard Green’s Short History of the English People,2 which relates to the year 1742 but which Howard considered apposite to 1898: “New forces, new cravings, new aims, which had been silently gathering beneath the crust of reaction, burst suddenly into view”. After discussing the political and economic questions which divided the nation, Howard went on-

There is, however, a question in regard to which one can scarcely find any difference of opinion. It is well nigh universally agreed by men of all parties, not only in England, but all over Europe and America and our colonies, that it is deeply to be deplored that the people should continue to stream into the already overcrowded cities, and

should thus further deplete the country

districts.

The aim of his book was to present his ideas for the development of garden cities--cities which would com- bine the best elements of town and country; and here it is important to emphasise that Howard was aiming directly at city and rural renewal. For example, he pointed to the difficul- ties involved in trying to improve schools by giving them playgrounds and extra classrooms to relieve the appalling overcrowding within and around them. In London land for improvement would cost &9500 per acre to acquire -in the countryside agricultural land could be bought for approximately &40 per acre. Why the difference ? Because people became their own worst enemies through the private ownership of, and the free market, in land. The pressure of people, and the demands on space which they made, inflated site values. Their skills and their expenditures on other commodities

constituted a market pull which encour- aged more and more industries, shops, and businesses to develop in the city and these in turn further increased the demand on, and therefore the price of, the limited supplies of land.

Howard proposed to strike at what he saw as the roots of poverty and poor facilities in the cities by relieving population pressures and thereby under- mining the excessive site values which blocked environmental improvements. At the same time he proposed to attack rural poverty and the lack of varied social, employment, education, hous-

ing, and recreational opportunities in the countryside. These problems were a function not of high land values, but of the lack of sizeable and expand- ing local markets, of fast transport to regional and national markets, and of varied industrial and commercial developments. The garden city was to be the instrument to accomplish this. Howard aimed high-he thought that London which had a 6 million population in 1898, should be slimmed to I.2 million if it was to offer all its inhabitants a high quality environment.

The typical garden city would occupy 6000 acres and have a target population of around 32 000 ; a group of garden cities, typically about six, would be separated by open country- side but linked to each other and to a central city (of approximately 58 000 population) by a fast mass transit system (rail) and by road. Of the 6 000 acres, about 1 000 acres would be for habitation but would include parks, gardens, etc; and 5 000 acres were to be predominantly agricultural but would include hospitals and other major ser- vice institutions which could benefit from the cleanliness, quiet, and cen- trality of such sites.

The core of Howard’s book is his discussion of how the garden city development could become self-financ- ing after the initial capital for site purchase was raised. It is an impressive argument-allowing initially for a

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Above, a look-ahead nearly fifty years, to the planned city of 1950

From a magazine of 1894, “The housetop garden”. . .

. . . and a novel idea for street lighting in the year 2000

A recent project for the sea city of the future

From PropheGsl to Prediction I73

limited but commercially useful return on capital borrowed, and the eventual public ownership of the land. He also shows how the agricultural output from his garden city could be increased in value by the extension of the local market. He indicates how the introduc- tion of a “critical mass” of engineers and other professionals to a rural area hitherto deprived of such people could generate new practices in waste recyc- ling to the benefit of agriculture and economic town services alike.

A million people and their children have moved into the 29 British new towns-two of which, Letchworth and Welwyn, started as Howardian garden cities. A further 300 000 people have moved to other towns expanded under decentralisation schemes. These are impressive testimonies to the power of Howard’s ideas, but nothing which incorporates his total conception has been done to date. The fatal flaw in his argument was a belief that politi- cians and industrialists, once given the models of Letchworth and Welwyn, would support the garden city idea; but throughout the years which fol- lowed, the weight of inertia and the terribly limited horizons of “realistic” and “practical” politicians and indus- trialists precluded the widespread imple- mentation of Howard’s ideas.

There could, at first glance, be no greater contrast to Howard than his contemporary, Patrick Geddes. It has been said, ironically of course, that Howard’s ideas were not treated seriously by academicians because he wrote with clarity and a great dearth of footnotes and references. Geddes did not publish much but what he did set down infuriated contemporaries and biographers alike by machine-gunning the reader with ideas, allusions, and strange words of his own invention: under this barrage lay a goodsyard lit- tered with jn~omplete trains of thought.

Geddes however started from a back- ground of biology and applied himsdf in his more mature years to town-

and-country planning problems. He needed multidimensional illustrations of his ideas, created a 36-box thinking machine as an initial reference system, and communicated his ideas through conversation, civic exhibitions, and town planning reports.

In the little book Evolution,s written jointly with J. A. Thomson, Professor of Natural History at Aberdeen Univer- sity, Geddes attacked crude transposi- tions from Darwinism which justified the profit motive as the mainspring of human progress. In particular he argued for theoretical models which reflected the complexity of life more accurately than those developed by economic theorists. In practical life he argued that the city and not merely its market should become the main politi- cal and economic reference point.

Our bio-sociology tends to justify the so-called “unpractical”. It is essentially the free living and self-supporting creatures that really get on, that evolve in the best sense. . . let us . . . have done with the current obses- sions of the money world, of most ease with labour, of getting something for nothing; perhaps above all, of that seeking after the assured life of petty, sedentary function- a&m, which is becoming a main curse of civilisation . . . how to combine [the] fundamental vividness of rustic life with the subtler, yet it may be even more strenuous life of productive urban culture, is perhaps the main problem before the evolutionist.

He had aheady undertaken individual tenement improvement and inaugur- ated an “outlook tower”, complete with a city exhibition and camera obscura, in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile; to a Carnegie foundation brief for a public park design in Du~ermline he had responded by a careful and complex civic survey and history of Dunfermline, detailed physical guide- lines for the park and its environs, and a rationale for town and park manage- ment policy which drew inter a&z on the town’s function within its region. Ahead of him lay his most productive years and the creation of a whole series

FUTURES April 1978

of town and village plans for the Indian sub-continent. It is impossible briefly to summarise the richness of these reports-suffice to say that they ranged over the lifestyles and work of the people, the physical attributes of their environ- ment, the insights afforded by the natural sciences, and the constraints of political and economic systems.

His impact on India was reflected in the great mosquito controversy.* The British administration evolved a control policy derived directly from advanced British research and US experiments in Panama. They proposed to fill in stagnant pools including village water-tanks in order to secure 100% kill of the mosquito larvae. The water- tanks were to be replaced by piped water supplies. Geddes looked at the capital investment needed to deal with the 300 000 villages in India, at the ancillary function of village water- tanks as “air-conditioning units” in villages known to him and at the need to find rural people high-status, paid employment. His “small is beautiful” reply to the hard-technology school was: train sweepers to keep the tanks free of dust and rubbish, stock the tanks with edible fish, and let the fish control the mosquito larvae.

Geddes viewed London and the other great and growing conurbations as “man-reefs”, but sought interstitial adjustment rather than re-assembIy as the main instrument for generalised environmental improvement. Within localities he advocated conservative surgery rather than wholesale demoli- tion and redevelopment. He was an early advocate of community educa- tion He saw the schools as windows to the world and the local environment, with all its complex life processes, as the place for learning by Iooking, by asking, by doing, and by combining insights and growing skills. The aim would be to create free-swimming citizens with an understanding of their natural, physical, political, and econo- mic environment. Such an education

would have intense and relaxed periods, but it would be life-long and the basis of participative planning. Geddes saw the professonal planner as a technical agitator in the field of civic govern- ment: the test of his skill would be the degree to which individuals in his area participated in the process of planning and shaping their own environment- for such professionals he coined the term civic servant.

The second coming of Malthus is a phenomenon of our time-but now his spectre is seen across the world. If it is again banished, it will not be by blinkered men in top posts or white coats or by ever more extensive raids on the diminishing natural resources of the world. Future economic growth will have to find ways of combining the exploitation of human and natural resources in a conservative way. It will have to respect people as indivi- duals with high and varied potentials and the natural environment as a home rather than a cash-box or dustbin.

Howard and Geddes insisted that shortages of food, of shelter, of employ- ment, and pollution must be attacked simultaneously if a success on one front was to be the basis of success on an- other. This is the rationale of partici- pative town and country planning and its contribution to human evolution. They also made this viewpoint a base for action. Consequently their ideas and their practice are more widely reIevant for the next turn of the centuries than they were for the last.

References

Reissued as E. Howard, Garden Cities- of Tomorrow (London, Faber, 1965). John Richard Green, Short History of the English People (London, Macmillan, c 1890), chapter 10. J. A. Thomson and P. Geddes, Evolu- tion (London, Williams and Norgate, 1914) ; Sir Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (London, Ernest Berm, 1968). See Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, ed, Patrick Geddes in India (London, Lund Humphries, 1947).

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