30-Day Map Challenge / Day 08 / Utopia

The Social City

Ebenezer Howard’s group of “slumless, smokeless cities,” 1898, redrawn to scale. 250,000 people in seven towns, joined by rail and canal. One of the towns is named Philadelphia.

Ebenezer Howard's Social City redrawn to scale: a Central City of 58,000 surrounded by six garden cities of 32,000 each — Garden City, Gladstone, Justitia, Rurisville, Philadelphia (highlighted in red) and Concord — linked by an inter-municipal railway, canals and radial rail lines, with farms, forests and institutions in the countryside between them. A two-mile scale bar is shown.

Howard’s numbers

Whole group	66,000 acres	250,000 people
Central City	12,000 acres	58,000
Each garden city ×6	9,000 acres	32,000

Howard didn’t stop at one garden city. When a town reached its limit, he wanted the next one built across a belt of countryside, all of them linked by fast rail into one “social city.” Several of the names are ideals: Justitia (justice), Concord, and Philadelphia, “brotherly love.”

Source: Ebenezer Howard, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), Diagram No. 7, dropped from the 1902 edition. Areas and populations as printed; ring distances measured against the diagram’s own scale bar; each town drawn with the plan of Howard’s Diagram No. 2. Original diagrams · Code and method.