Abstract

In 1898, British social reformer Ebenezer Howard published To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, calling for ‘garden city’ communities based on the principles of decentralized industry, urban resettlement, low-density housing, and a ‘healthy’ combination of town and country life. To-morrow catalyzed an international movement that continues to influence urban planning. To date, historians have devoted scant attention to the role of physical culture in garden city history and the lead up to the first garden city at Letchworth in 1903. For Howard and movement supporters, the healthfulness of garden cities depended on surrounding each community, its social activities, and its prescribed forms of physical culture with preserved English countryside. This idealizing of bucolic spaces led industrialists and political leaders to embrace the model and incorporate it in their broader political agendas centered on working-class degeneration and strengthening the physical ‘stock’ of the British Empire. This essay examines the role of physical culture in the history of garden city movement discourse between 1898 and 1903. By examining the history through the lens of physical culture, it is argued that garden cities represented a spatialized strategy of modern biopower, as planners sought to regulate working-class life.

摘要

1898 年，英国社会改革家埃比尼泽·霍华德 (Ebenezer Howard) 发表了《明天：通往真正改革的和平之路》( To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform)，呼吁建立基于分散工业、城市重新安置、低密度住房和“健康”组合原则的“花园城市”社区。城镇和乡村生活。明天催化了一场继续影响城市规划的国际运动。迄今为止，历史学家很少关注体育文化在花园城市历史中的作用，直到 1903 年莱奇沃思的第一个花园城市出现。对于霍华德和运动支持者来说，花园城市的健康取决于每个社区的周围、社会活动，以及保留英国乡村的规定形式的体育文化。这种田园式空间的理想化导致工业家和政治领导人接受了这种模式，并将其纳入他们更广泛的政治议程，以工人阶级的退化和加强大英帝国的物质“存量”为中心。本文考察了体育文化在 1898 年至 1903 年之间的花园城市运动话语历史中的作用。