Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  News from Nowhere

  According to their keenest student and harshest critic Karl Marx, the socialist utopians’ proposals were ‘necessarily doomed to failure’, because they attempted to create a perfect world, rather than change the existing one.22 Marx dismissed their schemes as ‘pocket editions of the New Jerusalem’, going so far as to write an open letter to Etienne Cabet, a French Owenite who, with his mentor’s encouragement, had tried to set up a proto-communist society in Texas in 1847. Marx warned Cabet that his project would fail because of its isolation: ‘… a few hundred thousand people cannot establish and continue a communal living situation without it taking on an absolutely exclusive and sectarian nature’.23

  What Marx had put his finger on was the fundamental problem dogging all ‘activist’ utopias: scale. Arguably the most influential utopian thinker of all time, Marx did not consider himself to be one, because for him, the only true utopia would come when the entire world, not just one part of it, was transformed by revolution. Like Adam Smith before him, Marx foresaw the way in which improvements in transport and communication – ‘the annihilation of space through time’, as he put it – would lead inevitably to globalisation:

  The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe … In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.24

  Since capitalism would lead inexorably to the concentration of wealth among just a few, the only route to collective justice was the gradual dismantling of the entire system. In his Communist Manifesto, written with Friedrich Engels in 1848, Marx listed the 10 measures necessary ‘in the most advanced countries’ to get the ball rolling, including ‘The abolition of property in land … equal liability of all to labour … the establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture … the combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, and the general abolition of the distinction between town and country.’25

  After Marx, utopians would no longer attempt to flee the world, but would try to change it from the ground up. A new batch of literary utopians took to imagining life under communism, among them William Morris, a pioneering British socialist, as well as one of the most gifted artist-craftsmen of his generation. Morris’s utopia took the form of a futuristic fantasy, News from Nowhere, in which a time-traveller (also called William) wakes up in an England transformed by a short, bloody revolution into a proto-communist state. He discovers that all land and means of production are now held in common, but instead of a single centralised authority, the country is organised into a federation of independent local democracies. Exploring his native London, William finds many landmarks have disappeared under ‘pleasant lanes’ and meadows, culverts have been restored to ‘bubbling brooks’, and Trafalgar Square has been transformed into a sloping sunny orchard full of apricot trees, from which the Dung Market (formerly the Houses of Parliament) can be glimpsed.26 ‘I fairly felt as if I were alive in the fourteenth century,’ comments Morris’s astonished time-traveller, who finds as he wanders though this Wen-turned-idyll that the ‘sham wants’ of capitalism no longer exist, and that most people work in agriculture or handicrafts, doing whatever suits them best. Thanks to their countrified, creative lives, the people have carefree countenances that are ‘frankly and openly joyous’, and when William asks one man what motivates them to work, he is told, ‘The reward of labour is life. Is that not enough?’27

  Part committed Marxist and part Romantic, Morris expressed the dilemmas of socialist utopianism perfectly. Fully prepared for the bloody revolution he believed to be necessary in order to create a better future, his vision of a pastoral, crafts-based, retro-medieval society was nevertheless about as fanciful as utopianism gets. The nearest it came to being realised was the distinctly un-revolutionary Guild of Handicrafts, set up by Charles Robert Ashbee in the picturesque Cotswold village of Chipping Campden in 1902. Like so many visionaries of his age, Morris’s idealism was based on a fantasy in which his own talents and preferences would be shared by the world at large. Unfortunately for him, the world had other ideas. However, there was one man who shared enough of his vision to bring at least some of it to reality. That man was Ebenezer Howard, and his utopia was one of the vanishingly few ever to be even partially realised – the Garden City.

  Garden Cities

  Perhaps the best-known utopia after those of Plato and More, the Garden City is arguably the most consistently misinterpreted of the three. Frequently cited as the inspiration behind the leafy suburbia that spread through Britain like a virulent weed during the early twentieth century, Garden Cities were originally intended to be precisely the opposite: a network of small, independent, self-sufficient city-states, connected to one another by railway. So how did the confusion come about, and why has it stuck? The answer goes back to the crinkle in the utopian timeline created by the socialist utopians. Howard’s use of the word ‘garden’ in his title simply triggered the Arcadian dream latent in every Victorian city-dweller, now seemingly brought within reach by the railways. Suburbia, for most people, was a garden city – at least as close to one as they cared to get. Howard’s title overtook his vision, which is a shame, because 100 years on, Garden Cities of To-morrow remains one of the most persuasive and inspiring utopian tracts ever written.

  A mild and modest man, Ebenezer Howard was an unlikely figure to bear the ‘visionary’ tag. After a formative period in America in his early twenties during which he discovered, among other things, that he was not cut out to be a farmer, he spent the rest of his life in London working as a parliamentary stenographer.28 Hardly the stuff of legend; yet arguably it was Howard’s unshowy personality and day job that made him the perfect vessel to absorb all the influences of his age and combine them into a vision that had something in it for everyone. First outlined in a pamphlet of 1898 entitled To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, his Garden-City concept was an amalgam of almost every utopian idea going, from Plato and More, via Owen, to Marx and Morris. Remarkably, Howard managed to turn this improbable smorgasbord into a proposal of such coherence and appeal that it won the immediate backing of the sort of convert of whom most utopians can only dream: captains of industry with plenty of cash. Within months, Howard had set up his Garden Cities Association with the heavyweight support of Lord Leverhulme, Joseph Rowntree and the Cadburys.

  In 1902, Howard republished his concept as Garden Cities of To-morrow, the title by which it would become both famous and commonly misapprehended. The book contained detailed proposals for what Howard called his ‘town–country magnet’: a Garden City that would combine the benefits of town and country living, while neutralising the disadvantages of both.29 The ‘magnet’ was effectively a city-state that would occupy 6,000 acres of land, of which 1,000 would be built up and the rest cultivated. Crucially, all the land would be owned by the community and held in trust on its behalf, with all rents going to run the city and fund public works. This would mean that as land values rose, it would be the city, and not individual landowners, that would get rich. The close bond between city and country would ensure that there was a thriving agricultural estate, which would benefit from a secure market for its produce, as well as receiving waste from the town to increase the soil’s fertility.30

  Howard’s economic ideas were radical, but it was his urban design that really caught the public imagination. Here was another irony: Howard, who was no designer, made it clear from the start that his plans were ‘merely suggestive, and will probably be much departed from’.31 Nevertheless, with the true instincts of a salesman, he took great pains to describe his ideal city, laid out in a spacious series of concentric rings, with boulevards of ‘very excellently built houses’, a large central public park bounded by a ‘Crystal Palace’ (a sort of circular winter-garden-cum-shopping-arcade), and a tree-lined Grand Avenue 150 metres wide. Despite all its open space, the city would
be relatively compact: with an average 200 people per hectare in residential areas, it would have a density similar to that of central London; however, unlike London, it would also have a maximum population of 30,000, with a further 2,000 to work the land.32 Once that number had been reached, a satellite city would be founded nearby, connected to the first by railway, a process that would repeat as the movement spread.

  Right from the start, Howard made it clear that his vision rested on progressive land reform. Although his initial ‘magnet’ would be built on private property, further land was to be compulsorily purchased as the movement grew, and ceded to local control. In this way, a sort of incremental land enclosure in reverse would take place, gradually restoring the British landscape to something like its medieval form.

  Although he had a Cobbett-like loathing of the choked-up metropolises of his day, Howard nevertheless recognised their social and cultural benefits. He argued that with his ‘cluster of cities’, which included a slightly larger Central City with a population of 58,000, the benefits of urban life – such as, for instance, the ability to put together a decent orchestra – need not be sacrificed:

  We should have a cluster of cities … each inhabitant of the whole group, though in one sense living in a town of small size, would be in reality living in, and would enjoy all the advantages of, a great and most beautiful city; and yet all the fresh delights of the country – field, hedgerow, and woodland – not prim parks and gardens merely – would be within a very few minutes’ walk or ride.33

  With its open-minded practicality, Garden Cities of To-morrow is a utopia for all seasons; a utopians’ utopia that reads like a back catalogue of the entire genre. Howard’s ‘magnet’ design is pure New Jerusalem, its limited population size Platonic. The plea for land reform is common to every utopian from More to Marx, the blending of urban and rural life likewise. Howard’s network of compact, self-governing city-states is borrowed from More, Owen and Morris, as is his political structure, a federation of local democracies. Other classic utopian themes include closeness to nature (More, Fourier, Owen), the enjoyment of work (More, Fourier, Morris), shared labour and communal dining halls (St Benedict, More, Fourier, Owen, Morris …). One could go on.

  Work on the first garden city began at Letchworth in 1903, to designs by the Arts and Crafts architects Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin. But although Letchworth gave architectural expression to Howard’s concept, the land reform and social ambition that were its real basis failed to materialise. Despite its initial backers, Letchworth was underfunded from the start, struggling to attract investors and residents alike. The directors soon expelled Howard from the board, and reneged on the intended transfer of funds to the municipality, while the residents, instead of bonding with one another and cooking communal meals, kept mostly to themselves and commuted to a nearby corset factory for work.34 Far from realising Howard’s vision, Letchworth simply confirmed what More and Marx had always known. When it comes to building communities, there is no perfect formula; no instant ‘good city mix’ that works just by adding people.

  Hero Architects

  Even as Parker and Unwin perfected their fancy brickwork details at Letchworth, the motor age was about to make their Arts and Crafts hamlets seem terminally old-fashioned. Just as the railways had liberated cities from geography, cars and aeroplanes now signalled the arrival of modernism, offering seemingly limitless possibilities for human inhabitation. Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine of 1922 epitomised the new vision. All soaring skyscrapers and linear apartment buildings snaking through leafy parkland, it was, like virtually every utopia before it, an attempt to reconcile city and country.35 What was new was the kind of city and country Le Corbusier had in mind.

  Like the maison citrohan, his prototypical machine for living in, Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine was geared towards placing man within an abstract idea of nature. Sunlight and air, openness and greenery were all necessary to modern man’s well-being; involvement with the ‘other’ nature (soil, earth, farmland) was not. Like Howard’s Garden City, Le Corbusier’s ‘contemporary’ one was filled with public parks and recreational spaces, made possible by tall buildings that released the ground plane (‘crystal towers that soar higher than any pinnacle on earth’), and a segregated circulation system.36 Despite advocating communal allotments in his outer ‘Garden City’ zone in concession to the needs of its humbler occupants, Le Corbusier’s citizens of the future were far more likely to wield a tennis racket than a pitchfork. Although he later modified his plans in the Ville Radieuse of 1935 – even going so far as to include rural collectives, Fermes Radieuses, between his linear strips of city – it was Le Corbusier’s earlier urban vision, with its relentless combination of tower blocks and inedible greenery, that stuck.

  The utopian dream that spawned a nightmare. Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine.

  It is easy now to question how such a clinical cityscape could possibly have been imagined to work; how it could have engendered a sense of community, locality or identity – to say nothing of how it might have been fed. But at the time, nobody thought to ask. Le Corbusier was a new breed of utopian: one equally capable of dreaming up fantasy cities, selling them, designing and building them. He was an architect – and, like almost every contemporary member of his profession, convinced that he had the vision and the means to save the world through design. He was the kind of person in whom the utopian tendency finally fused with reality.

  In Europe, where the availability of land was always an issue, Le Corbusier’s ‘crystal towers’ seemed to offer at least some kind of spatial trade-off. But for the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, unlimited freedom of movement suggested a rather different opportunity: that of restoring man to his ‘natural horizontality’.37 Wright, who like Le Corbusier was an uncontested genius when it came to designing individual buildings, spent the last 30 years of his life refining plans for his ‘Broadacre City’, best summarised as a proposal to scrap North American urban civilisation and replace it with a coast-to-coast patchwork of family smallholdings, each with its own spacious ‘Usonian’ house (‘Usonia’ was Wright’s preferred term for his horizontal paradise).38 Wright saw a return to the land as the means by which Usonian man, ‘the bravest and the best’, would rediscover his true nature. ‘Of all the underlying forces working toward emancipation of the city dweller,’ he wrote, ‘most important is the gradual reawakening of the primitive instincts of the agrarian.’38

  First published as The Disappearing City in 1932, the fully fledged project emerged as The Living City in 1958, complete with a meticulous 12-foot-square scale model showing how four square miles of the project might look. The patchwork of one-acre plots was to be connected by a network of hedge-lined highways that would be noiseless and odourless, since all the traffic would be electric. Although Usonians were expected to grow at least some of their food, their efforts would be supplemented by specialist farmers, who would take food ‘fresh every hour’ to roadside markets: vast pyramidal structures that were to serve as the city’s economic, social and cultural hubs. Like every good activist utopian, Wright was convinced the time for his vision was nigh: ‘The whole swollen commercial enterprise we call the City proceeds to stall its own engine,’ he wrote. ‘The day of reckoning is not so far away.’40 Then the Broadacre carpet would be ready to roll out, restoring man to the land, his ‘true line of human freedom on earth’:

  … everywhere in America this warm upsurging of life is our heritage: a nation truly free to use its own great woods, hills, fields, meadows, streams, mountains and wind-blown sweeps of the vast plains all brought into the service of men and women in the name of mankind … This – to me – is the proper service to be rendered by the architects of our country …41

  By Locke out of Jefferson with a hefty dash of Thoreau, The Living City reads like an Outward Bound manual one moment, a pitch for the job of jobs the next. What it never reads like, however, is a project that anticipated the planet running out
of gas:

  … imagine man-units so arranged and integrated that every citizen may choose any form of production, distribution, self-improvement, enjoyment, with the radius of, say, ten to forty minutes of his own home – all now available to him by means of private car or plane, helicopter or some other form of fast public conveyance …42