#Garden city standard notes series

Others, endowed with an acute practical sense, farm legumes. The town developers’ magazine noted in 1945 that some of the inhabitants prefer above all, a grand predominance of flowers. Dines (2016) also points to the importance of gardening and agriculture as healthy elements of the town (in keeping with Howard’s model) in the planning and evolution of the Ciudad Jardín. Although the town did not have a formal greenbelt, as in Howard’s original conception, open spaces at the edge of the settlement were set by boundary creating elements including the railway lines, and by landowning families in the area. Lomas del Palomar was focused on a large park at its centre known as the ‘Great Recreation Park’ with its spatial (and Palomar marketing) prominence reflecting garden city healthy living ideals and a ‘garden village’ feel to the centre of the town, according to Dines (2016). The ‘garden’ side of the garden city was well represented. At the same time there was a strong focus on keeping the garden city walkable: between houses, shops, cultural facilities, green spaces and work places in the industries that had been attracted to the town.

Like the garden city examples in neighbouring Brazil, irregular block structures resulting from the intersection of radial and diagonal streets, were most unlike the traditional urban grid of central Buenos Aires.

#Garden city standard notes series

Covering around 90 hectares the planned town was primarily comprised of areas of separate houses and gardens, focused at the core on a large park and a series of central squares, including the main Plaza del Avión where commercial and cultural land uses were placed. Its physical design was intended to support some level of self-sufficiency. In Palomar’s case, the town’s place shaping, with a grand avenue, radiating circular elements and zoned areas for a largely self-sufficient town of housing, green space, industry and other land uses, showed direct design connections to these diagrams.Īlso largely in keeping with Howard’s ideas, not only would Lomas del Palomar be as far as possible self-sufficient over time, its construction would use local materials where it could.

Garden city proponents nonetheless sometimes treated them as prototype plans. Howard made clear these diagrams, with their circular shapes and the hubs and spokes of the social city constellation of settlements, were not designs as such and were for illustrative purposes. Like many other garden settlements worldwide the design for Lomas del Palomar made use of diagrammatic representations that Howard had drawn to demonstrate garden city principles. Lomas del Palomar as a planned settlement shows in its town plan clear connections to Ebenezer Howard’s diagrams for the garden city. This new small city was reachable by way of two railway lines it was located between and which acted as its boundaries on either side (Dines, 2016: 58).

Located some 20 kilometres from downtown Buenos Aires, and was developed in 1944 by a German émigré Dr Erich Zeyen (there is more about Dr Zeyen later in the pamphlet). The garden city of Lomas del Palomar is the best known of Argentina’s garden cities and suburbs. The main examples of Ciudad Jardíns – garden cities and suburbs – were found in Buenos Aires, and the most famous of these is the Ciudad Jardín Lomas del Palomar which is described below. Argentina demonstrated a preference for garden neighbourhoods as a planning standard for city expansion into the suburbs, with family homes meeting a Peronist ideal that they should ‘be adequate, hygienic, comfortable, and economic, besides social, and privately owned’ very much to the fore.

Like a number of other South American countries, Argentina’s early to mid-twentieth century urban development was influenced by the garden city movement – and made a unique contribution to it.