Quotation: Railways

[gothwalk]

The 10th Edition Encyclopedia Britannica describes a different planet, really. It was published in MCMII, or 1902 for the Roman-numeral challenged. There's a lot of sound good sense in there, much of which appears to have been forgotten, or made impossible, in the intervening century:

"In ideal conditions the homes of the people, and especially the poor, must be in the country. Air, light, low rent, ground to till, and wholesome recreation for children can only be had by scattering the working population of a city into the surrounding country to sleep..."

-- Railways, Vol 32.

This was in support, essentially, of the idea of a good public transport network, an idea that Dublin is only reluctantly arriving at again.

Comments

[sshi.livejournal.com]

Ha, you're assuming that Dublin is in any way approaching a good transport network. In a week when it came out that the Maynooth commuter train is colloquially known as 'the Calcutta Express'?

But, yes, that's very much in the vein of Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City Movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement) - I just checked and they would have been very active during the period when the Encyclopedia was published, as the association was founded four years beforehand and Letchworth Garden City started the year after. Both Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City are pretty successful at being Town-Country magnets, I think and are still desirable places to live. The nearest we got over here was actually the planning of Marino after WWII, and to a certain extent, Crumlin.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

Well, I wasn't so much saying that we have one as that it's been realised we need one. :)

Has Marino been considered a design success? There are a couple of similar layouts on the maps, iirc.

Stuff like the Garden City Movement fascinates me - it's kind of mindboggling to realise that city planners and developers have now not been listening to ecologists for a century.