Utopia/The Perfect City

The perfect city appears as an ideal repeatedly throughout The City Planner. Urban planners and architects throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have proposed ideas for what would, in their minds, provide inhabitants with the perfect way of life and eliminate all contemporary evils of the urban environment. The Garden City, proposed by Ebenezer Howard, is one example of this. These cities center on a large, common green space with six boulevards coming from the center so that each citizen is within a short distance of these common areas. Similarly, Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacres gives each family one acre of land, reduces government to the extreme, and envisions a countryside united with other parts of the country by high-speed transportation. John B. Jackson describes his "Almost Perfect Town" as an imaginary town in the American Southwest, where each part of the city plays its role...