Sir Ebenezer Howard

Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) was an English stenographer and social reformer, the founder of the garden city movement. Born in London, he spent some years farming and clerking in the United States before returning to work as a parliamentary shorthand writer. Influenced by Edward Bellamy and Henry George, he published To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1898, reissued in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-Morrow, proposing planned towns of limited size ringed by farmland and owned by their inhabitants. He saw two of them built, Letchworth from 1903 and Welwyn from 1920, and his ideas shaped town planning throughout the twentieth century. He was knighted in 1927.