When Ebenezer Howard published his book To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1898, the challenges facing London and other large industrial cities were unprecedented. Population growth, unplanned and weakly regulated development in the 1800s had led to the emergence of overcrowded and polluted slum conditions where epidemics of tuberculosis took place and open space was scarce (Cook, 2014). Howard and his model of garden city came to propose a solution to all these social problems. By taking only the advantages of the city and the countryside (named The Three Magnet Theory), the garden city model is the result of a combination of both. This model is based on various criteria such as it would have a fixed limit and would be interconnected with others garden cities through the principle of a polycentric vision named by Howard Social City (Hall, 2014). In our case, we will focus on the following criteria: Cities are size limited.

This point is particularly interesting because by choosing to limit the size of the city around 32,000 people on each garden city, E. Howard makes Garden Cities into human-scale cities where the spaces in the city are in close proximity to each other. For current urban planners, this subject of proximity would evoke the concept of ‘15-min city’ (Moreno et al., 2021) which appeared these last few years. On account of that, we will try to show how the concept of Garden Cities is still present today in our way of planning the city based on the ‘15-min city’ concept.

As we said, this notion of proximity (even if this word is not employed by Howard) is very present in the garden city’s model. For example, we can find a lexical field related to this term in The Three Magnets scheme, such as: distance, closing out and isolation. For Howard, the close relationship of residential areas to local services and working places are essentials. As can see in the cartoon created by Halas & Batchelor which explains the principles of Garden Cities in 1946; cities are created such that people are close to their working places and to others daily services, like schools, groceries, town hall, parks etc. This proximity between facilities, amusement places, working places and houses would enable residents to travel mostly by bicycle and by foot, generating beneficial effects such as a good health and a reduction of air pollution.

This concept of proximity developed by E. Howard is very interesting to study today for many reasons. This ‘15-min city’ approach gained great momentum during the global COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictions, as ‘the neighbourhood came into focus as the only place to fulfil essential activities’ (M. Di Marino & al., 2022). The idea of 15-min city could be define as a city whereby most of ‘citizens are able to meet most or all of their needs within a short walk or bike ride from home’ (M. Di Marino & al., 2022). At first sight several connections can be made with the Garden City concept developed by E. Howard. In fact, there are both developed in a context of health crisis where cities needed to find solution to improve inhabitant’s wellbeing. Moreover, those concepts are based on a proximity-based approaches. Proximity refers to ‘the location of people, services, and activities near one another and, consequently, the access to spatially distributed opportunities for residents’ interactions in their neighbourhoods’ (Diaz-Sarachaga, 2021 cited by M. Di Marino, 2022). At the end, proximity offers a lot of advantages, for example the health thanks to the daily walking/cycling and also creates local social interaction, as well as ‘building community and neighbourhood relationships’ (G. Pozoukidou & Z. Chatziyiannaki, 2021). Furthermore, the Garden City approach and the concept of ‘15-min city’ have a focus on the workplace. Both are based on an alternative way of thinking ‘the development of the city by bringing activities to the neighbourhoods rather than people to activities’ (Pozoukidou and Chatziyiannaki 2021).

However, one element seems to make the difference between these two concepts: the density of buildings. In fact, the ’15-minute city’ concept generates a higher density of buildings, uses and people. The garden city concept, on the other hand, is based on the countryside, offering space and tranquillity – density is not high, it doesn’t even exist. However, with climate change and new social contingencies, it would not be right to continue the artificialisation of land as if it was nothing. We could not imagine building neighbourhoods from scratch, as Ebenezer Howard imagined for his garden cities. Today and in the future, we need to limit land resources. So, we need to think about the density of buildings, people and uses. The whole issue is to find the right density for each area for the ’15-minute’ concept to make cities viable places for citizens.