In September 1868, forty-six-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted, already the most prominent landscape designer and conservationist of his day, sat down at his desk in New York City to compose a report on a new suburb proposed for the banks of the Des Plaines River, about nine miles from Chicago – a site to which the developer, E. E. Child, had given the deceptively bland name Riverside.1 To understand the possibilities for this site, in Olmsted’s account, you had to understand not so much the environmental but rather the social conditions that would encourage people to live there. You had to understand, he wrote, that the middle of the nineteenth century was a period of what today we would call urbanisation. People were coming together in booming towns and cities. They had developed a taste for the luxuries and refinements that you only get from city life. And yet, from the vantage point of his desk in New York, Olmsted could sense something in the air. ‘There are symptoms of a change,’ he wrote to Riverside’s financial backers, who had contracted his and his partner’s firm, Olmsted, Vaux & Co., to design the site from scratch – ‘a counter-tide of migration’ away from the city and back towards a different kind of life. You see this phenomenon, he said, in the common desire to live near parks. You see it in the desperation to plant rows of trees, ‘little enclosures of turf and foliage’ in every newly laid street. It has been established, Olmsted went on, by a Dr Rumney of the British Association for the Advancement of Social Science, that simply living near other people can make a person ill, even manifesting in a kind of ‘nervous feebleness’.

It was the suburb, according to Olmsted, that was truly the city of the future. And not just any suburb, but rather a suburb that could successfully recreate that very particular feeling of being not in the city at all – that could recreate the feeling of being in the countryside, with its pure air, its shade, its open spaces, its ‘distance from the jar, noise, confusion and bustle of commercial thoroughfares’.2 A realisation was dawning: there was something just a bit off about city life. The city was not, in fact, a very good place to live in at all. Some new way of living, not quite the city, not quite the country, now loomed on the horizon. As Olmsted put it the following year, in a letter to the author and journalist Edward Everett Hale, the key thing now was to create a space for living that was some mixture of the two. ‘[I] urge principles, plans and measures,’ Olmsted wrote effusively, ‘tending to the ruralizing of all our urban population and the urbanizing of our rustic population.’3

Olmsted was neither the first nor the only person to have such thoughts. The fantasy of the city that was not really a city at all, of the landscaped park that still maintained the rugged virtues of the open frontier – this was already a guiding theme of American public life in the nineteenth century. It was a fantasy, indeed, the historian Dorceta Taylor reminds us, that was held on to with special fervour by urban elites, like Olmsted, anxious about what city life was doing to their own waning sense of racial superiority.4 Through different, often overlapping waves of urbanisation across the globe, this idea has never fully gone away. My interest in this book is in following its contours into the present day, as a new kind of anxiety about the city, and a new kind of desire for the countryside, begins to rise again. This desire is, of course, in many ways very different from the racialised anxieties of Olmsted’s day. And yet also maybe not so different.

Things ultimately went south for Olmsted and Vaux at Riverside: their plans were not followed exactly, the developer went bust, and Olmsted had to take payment in lots, which quickly collapsed in value. And yet somehow Riverside, a surprisingly sturdy green village on the banks of an unloved river, began to take shape. Olmsted was by then out of the picture. But there was another figure, then living in obscurity in Chicago, who may well have seen Riverside under construction, and who would carry this urge articulated by Olmsted much further in the decades that followed.5 This was Ebenezer Howard, the unlikely founder of the Garden City movement, who would go on to establish two new urban centres on his return to his birthplace in England: first there was Letchworth Garden City, founded in 1904; and then the new town of Welwyn Garden City, which followed in 1920.

On an unseasonably warm day in mid-September 2021, I caught a train at King’s Cross in London, admired the station’s spectacular new glass and steel dome – now arced over the frantic concourse like an upturned glass on an ant colony – and travelled twenty miles north, to the sleepy commuter county of Hertfordshire, and into a different world entirely. My destination was Welwyn Garden City – England’s second and last true ‘garden city’, once part of a great international movement to shift urban planning in the twentieth century towards new, medium-sized satellite towns, surrounded by green space. Just as Frederick Law Olmsted had dreamed, these towns were to be new places for living that were not quite urban and not quite rural, with decent housing and work for all, and underpinned by an economic system (this was not part of Olmsted’s dream) that would reinvest the proceeds of increasing land values for everyone’s benefit. Though it never really worked out like that, and the broader movement has long since faded away, the busy and prosperous town of Welwyn was nonetheless happily celebrating its hundredth anniversary, as well as its small but critical role in the history of urban planning. And so I went along, curious to see what the one-time city of the future looked like, now that that future had, unambiguously, if rather unceremoniously, arrived.

Having founded Welwyn with his collaborators and backers in 1920, Ebenezer Howard quickly appointed a Montreal-born architect, Louis de Soissons, to create the town’s master plan. De Soissons, who had just graduated from university, would end up spending his life as the chief architect of Welwyn Garden City, dying there in 1962. In his original plan, de Soissons laid out the green heart of the town a bit like a sideways ‘T’, where the horizontal bar, Parkway, is longer than the vertical bar, Howardsgate. At the north end of Parkway, de Soissons added a small, bulbous park, rather pompously known as The Campus. Seen from above, the whole thing looks a bit like a gun or an erect penis.

The idea behind Welwyn, and behind garden cities more generally, was not simply to remake urban spaces on the basis of green and healthy country life. It was an attempt to reform how land was owned and who made money from it – to stop increases in land value from benefiting solely private owners, and instead to use that rise for the collective good of the residents. But the movement was also about creating a new kind of person. Or at least it was a serious attempt to return the benighted inhabitants of industrial cities to some more natural state. ‘Men’, Howard wrote, quoting the eugenicist philosopher Herbert Spencer, ‘are equally entitled to the use of the earth.’ What they want is the ‘practical life’, the fruits of their toil, an equal share, a short commute, a patch of grass to call their own, neither rural simplicity nor urban drudgery, but something somehow in between. If planners would just use ‘the resources of modern science’, Howard wrote, ‘Art may supplement Nature, and life may become an abiding joy and delight’.6

Today, though, I realised as I exited the ugly 1990s shopping mall that somehow contains the train station, if central Howardsgate is still a lush, green, formally landscaped city-centre park, it’s also more or less a taxi rank. A line of cars crept around the edges, like flies on a cake, collecting passengers from the station and the nearby chain shops. Mutual ownership, meanwhile, disappeared in the 1980s. Today, houses are available on the open market – many of them, I saw in estate agents’ windows as I walked around, going for well over a million pounds. Welwyn Garden City might still represent a kind of utopia, I reflected as I tried not to get run over by the speeding commuters in their SUVs, but whose utopia, exactly, was not quite so clear.

I had come to Welwyn because I’d been thinking about urban planning and the future of the city for some time. I wanted to know why so many people in that field were convinced there was something about our cities that was simply bad for us, and especially that there was something about them that was psychologically or even morally bad for us. I was trying to imagine what this future would look like, and how it might be different from previous attempts to fix these problems. I was also trying to figure out why it was that so many planners, architects and policy-makers were so fixated on nature as the solution to all of the city’s problems – why they seemed to think that treating the city as if it was a kind of organism, a living thing, would finally bring planning and architecture into the twenty-first century. As I traipsed...