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H2020Individual fellowship2018–2020

GARDENCITYIDEA · Idea, Ideal, Idyll: Garden Cities in Central Europe 1890s-1930s

Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2018-09-01 → 2020-08-31
EU contribution
€195,455
Participants
1
Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST

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Results in brief

Idea, Ideal, Idyll: Garden Cities in Central Europe 1890s-1930s

GARDENCITYIDEA´s key objective was to undertake a critical analysis of the international garden city movement as an instance of cultural, expert, and intellectual exchange between the United Kingdom and central Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Scientifically speaking, the project set a milestone in the investigation of the garden city movement in central Europe. This has been communicated to the international academia in several conferences both in Europe and the US and has always gained broad interest and positive feedback. GARDENCITYIDEA identified new transnational and national networks of intellectual and social exchange between the UK, Germany, Austria and the Czech lands (Czechoslovakia from 1918). Based on many new examples and case studies, the newly achieved scholarship contributes to a fundamental revision of Czech national identity, history and art history. The innovative approach to the past sheds new light not only on modern architecture and town planning but comprises also of significant insights to the issues of nationalism in the 1890s-1930s. The garden city movement was parallel to the women rights movement and its ultimate goal of a fundamental social transformation. Analysing historical sources relating to links between urbanist thought and wider social questions, especially, gender identities provides significant disparities in time and place. If garden city movement involved some women issues in the UK and Germany, in the Czech lands it was only into a very limited extend.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

This project examines processes of cultural and intellectual exchange between Britain and Central Europe, with particular regard to ideas of urban and architectural design. It focuses on the utopia of the garden city, invented by Ebenezer Howard in the classic work To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, published in 1898. Howard sought not only to reform architectural design, but also to effect social change through facilitating new forms of communal living, including the role of women. Soon after, the first garden cities were built in Britain. It is generally accepted that the visions of British thinkers and designers such as Howard was influential in central Europe. However, beyond Germany, the impact of British ideas and practices in central Europe has only been studied in a schematic way. This project therefore interrogates the transfer of ideas from Britain to central Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, their implementation, development and application in particular, garden towns and garden suburbs. Its main focus is on the Czech and Slovak lands (part of Austria-Hungary before 1918, afterwards, Czechoslovakia), but it also makes comparative reference to Austria and Germany. Equally, the project examines how urbanist ideas from central Europe were then transferred back to Britain, in the form of the company town built in East Tilbury in England by the Czech shoe company Baťa in the 1930s.It will be the first systematic and comparative study to take into account not only the local national context (as well as that of the German speaking countries), but also the wider networks of ideas and practices that were in circulation. As such, it asks a key question: How and why were the utopian ideals of English garden cities “translated” into the Czechoslovak and wider central European context? Conversely, how were such ideas “fed back” into British architecture and urban planning by Czechoslovak architects and planners?

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

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Data: CORDIS, © European Union