The Design Alternatives Garden City . The Garden City is a set of ideas meant to reform the traditional city. Those ideas dominated most of the 20th Century and therefore underlie most conventional planning, zoning, and subdivision practices. The town has a center for town-wide functions but it is also divided into neighborhoods to provide identity at the neighborhood scale. Each neighborhood has an elementary school, churches, playgrounds, and maybe a retail center.
Most employment is on the periphery of the town, clearly separated from the town's neighborhoods.
Civic buildings and large churches often have prominent locations in the town center. The city has a clear entry and defined boundaries, and is ideally surrounded by a greenbelt. The Design Alternatives Contemporary City . The contemporary city, reflecting contemporary development patterns, is very different from the first two forms. Those fragmented parts are connected by major streets whose primary function is to allow traffic to flow as freely as possible.