Planned Cities & Towns
The Garden City Movement
From the early part of the nineteenth century, the concept of planned cities and towns had begun to take root. The idea that once a town reached a certain size, planners should halt its growth by a green belt and begin a second town began to take root. Pioneer industrial villages developed in the countryside, such as Lever's Port Sunlight, near Liverpool, and Cadbury's Bourneville, near Birmingham, provided physical examples and practical illustrations that decentralization was possible.

In his famous diagram of the three magnets (1898) Ebenezer Howard brilliantly encapsulated the virtues and vices of the late Victorian city and countryside. To summarise the city had economic and social opportunity but overcrowded housing and an appalling physical environment. On the other hand, the countryside offered open space and clean air, but little prospect of employment or social life. By creating a third magnet "Town-Country" it would be possible to gain all the opportunities of the town and all the qualities of the country. The way to achieve this, Howard argued, was to create a totally new town in the countryside. The Garden City would have a fixed upper limit of 32,000 people living on 1000 acres (405 hectares) of land. It would be surrounded by a much larger area of permanent green belt (5000 acres) containing farms and community buildings.

The Garden City movement developed its' first new towns at Letchworth, by the Unwin-Parker partnership in 1909. The ideas of the Garden City Movement spread to both mainland Europe and to the United States within the next three decades.

In the postwar period, the New Towns Act 1946 was enacted and Britain built 28 new towns. While ostensibly built on the principles of the Garden City Movement, they are generally much bigger than Howard's Garden Cities and are essentially free-standing.
In the United States, the movements' ideas permeated the majority of postwar suburban development.

Over one hundred years after the Garden City movement began, the diagram of the three magnets appears to have entirely reversed. Now the town has some of the less original characteristics of the countryside, its' older factories have closed because of competition, it offers excellent jobs in the new information and financial services economy for some and long-term unemployment for those who lack the education and skill to compete for the new jobs. There is gridlock and pollution in the streets and it is perceived by many as deprived and crime-ridden: many of its schools are closing as parents tend to move out in search better education for their children. The countryside has been transformed. Electricity and the car make it easy to get all kinds of opportunities. The telephone, fax and e-mail make it easy to communicate. Television and the internet give access to entertainment, education and information. However, life is too often completely dependent on the car.

The Irish experience is no different to that in most western countries. The leafy suburb between town and country is the form of settlement desired by most families since the early part of the last century. The success of the suburb as a place to live has been reinforced as it became the accepted refuge from the evils of the city. However, as the suburbs have become the dominant form of urban development, the weaknesses and problems associated with them have become more apparent. When the majority live in suburbs, the assumed advantages become disadvantages as communication and accessibility become more car-dependant, and hence more time consuming. In addition, the aspirations of most Irish suburban dwellers to live near city and country, to own and control their property including front and back gardens, to have constant freedom of movement and to cherish their privacy, all tend to work against establishing good communities.