Conclusion: Physical Culture and the Limits of Garden City Planning
摘要
This conclusion revisits the book’s main argument—that the history of garden city planning in early-twentieth-century Britain and the United States were contexts of biopolitical intentionality through the planning of spaces for healthy living and physical culture—and contemplates its contemporary significance, particularly in relation to discussions of sustainable community planning. The conclusion engages with the notion that the biopolitical history of the garden city movement undermines the potential utility of Howard’s Garden City vision as a model of sustainable community planning in the twenty-first century. Part of this is because, as the book tried to show, garden city planners approached healthy living and physical culture through objectives of regenerating and/or regulating the health and, by extension, economic productivity of their imagined residents. This ultimately limited the reformist potential of the movement, for the new communities became sites for the reinforcement of dominant and existing forms of physical culture and resulted in a community form that was largely in line with the values of twentieth-century industrial capitalism.