The new urbanism
How John Ruskin's ideas influenced generations of urban planners
Archived article from Feb 4, 2000
By Diane Cornell
When the Bernardsville borough council passed an ordinance this past October limiting the size of houses in that affluent town in an attempt to preserve its rural character and protect the environment, they were unknowingly drawing on ideas first promulgated by John Ruskin.
A noted 19th-century British socialist and art critic, Ruskin was concerned with preserving natural beauty. He shunned widespread development -- even going so far as to call for the destruction of New York City -- and worried about industry encroaching on the environment.
But to a large extent his contributions to urban planning and design, which still resonate today in planned communities such as Celebration, Fla., and Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Md., remain largely unknown. They are hidden within his prolific writings on socialism and art criticism, topics with which he is more widely associated. In fact, they are so well-hidden that it took four years for Professor Michael H. Lang to uncover the kernels and assemble them into his book "Designing Utopia: John Ruskin's Urban Vision for Britain and America" (Black Rose Books).
Lang, chair of the department of urban studies and community planning on the Camden campus, was drawn to Ruskin's work while studying Yorkship Village, a thriving community within the otherwise deteriorating city of Camden.
Yorkship Village embodies much of Ruskin's urban vision: It has a large, central village green, which serves as a focal point for the community; footpaths to ensure that the village is completely accessible by walking; a school, churches, library and stores all radiating from the central green; and an ecological belt of nearby streams and marshland.
"I was intrigued that this community, which was built in 1917 for shipyard workers, had held the loyalty of its citizens amid the decline and the industrialization of the rest of the city," Lang says. The village, he discovered, was conceived as a planned community based on the garden city developments popular in England at the time. Those developments, in turn, were grounded in Ruskin's ideas of good urban design. Lang decided it was time to investigate Ruskin's vision further.
He then spent countless hours slogging through pages of Ruskin's articles, many of which he found convoluted and pedantic. While Ruskin has been the topic of numerous scholarly publications, his books are rarely studied today because his turgid writing style discourages all but the most dedicated readers, Lang notes. Further impeding his research, says Lang, was Ruskin's inability to express his ideas in a coherent or straightforward manner. His urban vision is scattered throughout his writings on art and social philosophy, forcing Lang to comb through thousands of pages of the prolific writer's work.
Ruskin's ideas were developed during the height of the Industrial Revolution -- a revolution he saw as destructive to open space and natural beauty and flawed for its failure to inspire works of architectural beauty. It was a viewpoint that put him at odds with the prevailing mood of excitement that accompanied the scientific and technological expansion of the times.
Ruskin loathed the tenets of the Industrial Revolution and all its mass-produced perfectionism, says Lang. Convinced that society was defined by its art, he was repelled by a revolution that placed little value on the beauty found in the work of skilled craftsmen. According to Ruskin, such a revolution, with its commitment to mass production, sapped the spirit of its workers, who were denied the satisfaction of seeing a product through from beginning to end. He feared that workers who were forced to do repetitive tasks on assembly lines would soon lose all ambition to create.
These aesthetic judgments underlie Ruskin's theories and proposals for ameliorating urban blight. But, by his own admission, he was ill-equipped to turn his concepts into practical plans. Most of his projects, from road building in Oxford to street sweeping in London, were short-lived. Rather, he left it to his supporters to establish organizations or movements to advance his ideas.
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