Why are Garden Cities in the news?

Abstract

As a new round of ‘garden cities’ starts to take shape in the United Kingdom, there has also been growing interest in ‘garden villages’ as a possible place-shaping form to help meet our need for new settlements in a sustainable and appealing way. The government has just announced some fourteen new such villages to be built in places around the country of which later in this piece. Of course this begs the question: what are ‘garden villages’? And is the thinking right that they can be part of a place-making solution for the United Kingdom? To explore those questions the think piece starts by looking at what we might define as a ‘garden village’ and then turns to more about why garden villages are very much in the news.