> They eventually settled on the “garden city,” a design popularized in the 1960s by English urban planner Ebenezer Howard.<p>That's your problem right there! The 'garden city' concept had already failed by the 1960s (both of the true garden cities were built by Howard in 1903 (Letchworth) and 1920 (Welwyn GC) - he died in 1928, so he wasn't popular in the 1960s).<p>What they were probably getting confused over, was the new town concept of the post-WW2 era, when towns such as Slough and Milton Keynes, which, as brutalist horrors, were already roundly panned by everyone except fashionista architects at the time they were built, and predictably sank into deprivation and decay by the 1980s.<p>Neither Garden Cities nor New Towns took into account any of the organic usage patterns that developed in organic towns, and thus ended up producing cultural wastelands for different reasons - Garden Cities because howard was a Quaker and had unpopular religious motivations resulting in stepford style living. And new towns because brutalism is depressing as fuck unless you're a fashionista, and encourages antisocial behaviour in normal people.