A Garden City

(From the December 2010 issue of the Maadi Messenger)

We can thank Charles Dickens for associating Christmas with the story of a man named Ebenezer. His classic A Christmas Carol gave us the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, whose life is transformed by visits from the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future one fateful Christmas Eve. Through Ebenezer’s humbling confrontation with eternity, he turns away from bitterness, becoming renewed through benevolence and generosity.

Given that Christmas is just a few weeks away, December seems a fitting month to explore the story of another Ebenezer who contributed significantly, albeit unknowingly, to both the design and governance of Maadi. Howard, however, had quite a bit more in common with Scrooge’s clerk Bob Cratchit, who was also a clerk of humble means.

Born in 1850, Howard was the son of a London shopkeeper. He completed his formal schooling at 15, and began work as a clerk, teaching himself shorthand in his spare time. At 19-years old, he travelled to the U.S., spending time as an itinerant preacher in Howard, Nebraska and later resuming office work in Chicago. While he left the U.S. in 1876, his time there instilled a certain idealism in Howard. “If Chicago did not fill his pockets with gold it did something better: it fitted him for world citizenship,” his friend and biographer Dugald MacFadyen later wrote.

Though Howard resumed work as a clerk in England, he also passionately pursued a scheme for addressing the challenge of rapid urbanization. Howard saw the current situation as lose-lose, where growing cities produced slums, while migration to urban centers depleted the countryside. He began a plan for harmoniously wedding town and country into a “garden city.” He explained that this third type of space would offer “the most energetic town life, with all the beauty and delight of the country.” Howard’s idea would go on to influence everything from railway satellite towns like Maadi, to public housing projects like the American Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The garden city was not intended to be a suburb, nor was it a method for managing urban sprawl. It was created through the purchase of a large plot of land that would be centrally controlled by a company. The company managed the design of the town, its services and utilities, and acted as both a municipal governing body, and landlord to residents. Agricultural land would be secured by a green belt surrounding the town, which would simultaneously create a buffer around the town and prevent overgrowth. If the town needed more space--another garden city should be founded.

The town’s interior was divided into various wards, with industry near the outskirts, and commerce, culture and religion nearer the center. The rest of the space was arranged into residential plots. Homes necessarily had yards, rather than being stacked on top of one another. All of these standards were to be preserved by the company that controlled the municipality.

Maadi bore all of the major hallmarks of Howard’s garden city scheme. Road 9 was the designated commercial space. The streets were laid out in a series of circular midans, so that green, public space remained central to the town’s aesthetic. The land surrounding Maadi was purchased by the company but left empty, insulating it from its surroundings. The Delta Land Company enforced these standards, and others pertaining to the design of homes and gardens, so that the company--in step with Howard’s recommendations--served as both governor and landlord.

The company and the broader public were aware that Maadi put Howard’s scheme into practice. Delta Land manager Tom Dale regularly referred to the town as “Maadi Garden City” in his correspondence. By 1920 one columnist wrote of Maadi, “Didn’t know we had a garden city in Egypt, did you? Well, we have. And about the dinkiest one ever.”

Christmas in Maadi may not have the cold weather, roast goose, and mulled cider that Dickens describes. But no matter the season, the influence of a different Englishman is never far off. We feel Ebenezer Howard’s impact every time we come upon one of Maadi’s circular midans. While they may not be a straightforward grid, that was the point. The garden city was supposed to foster community through design. The centralizing trajectory of Maadi’s streets was similarly intended to bring residents together.

Sidebar: It appears all of Cairo was affected by Howard’s scheme for carefully planned cities. At the same time that the Delta Land Company purchased the area south of Cairo and began developing Maadi, two other companies set to work on Heliopolis in the northeast, and the aptly named Garden City immediately south of downtown. Like Maadi, these areas were owned and designed by foreign land development companies, which determined the areas’ aesthetics. Perhaps the irony is that Cairo’s Garden City conforms the least to Howard’s ideals. It is part of the city, rather than serving as its own entity. Rather than marrying the virtues of town and country, it is a neighborhood among many, and very much part of the booming metropolis.