Ebenezer Howard's Garden City idea incorporated a landscape architecture concept with his social, economic and regional planning concepts. This landscape architecture concept, as shown above, is based on the dominant landscape and garden design principle of the nineteenth century: that of creating a transition from a Beautiful foreground, through a Picturesque middleground to a Sublime background. Olmsted adapted this concept for urban design, by planning park systems, and Howard adapted it for his Garden Cities concept. It can be understood as a Landscape Cities concept and viewed as a predecessor of what is now called Landscape Urbanism. The Three Magnets Diagram (below) makes three points:
(1) Town life has good and bad characteristics
(2) Country life has good and bad characteristics
(3) Town-Country life can have all the good things about life in towns and life in the country - without any of the bad things.
Ebenezer Howard Garden Cities of Tomorrow could, with advantage, have had the title Landscape Cities of Tomorrow
Welwyn Garden City Landscape
Letchworth Garden City Landscape
