Learning from Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City: garden cities’ policies for the development of existing settlements in the contemporary world

Abstract

So far, the garden city model has been analysed and adopted by scholars, urban planners, and institutions to design garden cities, new towns, and suburban communities as new settlements from scratch around the world. In contrast, this paper explores the potentialities of such a model to provide a multi-faceted approach based on territorial, socio-economic, and urban planning strategies, thus offering a series of policies to combat a wide range of issues in existing communities. For that purpose, this paper provides a new approach about the garden city model through the case studies of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City and latest updated models to form a new scheme with the capability to encourage the decentralisation of population and means of production across the territory, develop cooperatives to achieve a self-financing system and affordable housing in existing communities, and implement the garden cities’ design principles for the regeneration and expansion of existing settlements towards a sustainable, attractive, self-reliant and prosperous future.