Cohousing-L Mailing List: New Towns and Garden Cities like Columbia, Maryland

[Catherine McCarthy (cmccarthy]

Kim Van Dyke said:

>This makes me think of the community of Columbia, Md., which had ambitions
>to combine socioecomic groups, if I remember correctly. While not cohousing,
>the principles (at least initially) were similar. The value question aside
>(this community seems to have had more practical, as opposed to ideological,
>intentions), can anyone comment on how Columbia fits into this topic, i.e.,
>what did the developers set out to do, and how successful were they in
>meeting their objectives?
>

Columbia is just one of many "New Towns" in the United States that were
designed to achieve a variety of social and environmental objectives - many
of which are similar to those being addressed by cohousing but on a larger
scale.  

I have a particular interest in Garden Cities/New Towns as I worked at
Sunnyside Gardens, NY about ten years ago (first garden city in the U.S.,
built in early 1900s in Queens).  Also I recently got back from a trip
where I got the chance to visit the first two in England (Letchworth and
Welwyn City) based on Ebenezer Howard's ideal of merging the best of the
City and the Country.

In terms of achieving their objectives, many of the New Town communities
have had mixed results.  However many of these projects were extremely
ambitious and built on a large scale and their "failures" were not always
under the control of the planners/founders nor really in the scope of
expectations.  One example is Radburn, New Jersey - an ambitious and very
early New Town which had major setbacks in development during the
depression in te mid 1930's resulting in critical parts of the community
never being built out.

Overall, I found it pretty difficult to evauluate the success of many of
these communities - it really depends on what you compare them to.  
Personally, from my experience at Sunnyside (a community of several hundred
homes set up on an city grid system except with inner courtyards) many of
the originally intended goals were achieved, others were not.  But when
evaluating its success, I think it is still much "better" than traditional
neighborhoods located nearby.


-Catherine


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Catherine McCarthy 
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