Greenbelt

Maryland. Hale Walker, planner. Douglas D Ellington and R J Wadsworth, architects. 1935

Greenbelt is the most fully realised town of
the Suburban Resettlement program adminis-
tered by Rexford Guy Tugwell, a New Dealer
who fervently believed in the ideas of
Ebenezer Howard and Clarence Stein. Stein
wrote that these government-sponsored
towns were 'the first experiments in the
combined development of the three basic
ideas of the modern community: the Garden
City, the Radburn Idea, and the Neighborhood
Unit.'¹

Greenbelt was set in what was then open
country, an easy 25-minute drive from
Washington DC. It incorporated many of the
planning ideals of Radburn, particularly the use
of the superblock and the separation of ped-
estrian and vehicular circulation systems,
though it did not carry forward that com-
munity's density or its sense of style. The
architecture of its individual buildings is bleak,
a weak Art Deco classicism at the shopping
centre combined with the minimal group
houses.

All of the Resettlement towns used an
uncomfortable, abstract geometry in their site
plans, with the exception of Greendale, Wis-
consin, designed by Jacob Crane and Elbert
Peets. Peets was one of the authors of Civic
Art, and a planner of suburban-style develop-
ments such as Wyomissing Park, Pennsyl-
vania.

Note

1. In his book Toward New Towns in America: MIT Press, Cambridge 1957, pp 118-177. Stein also discusses Greenhills, Ohio, Greenbrook, New Jersey, and Greendale, Wisconsin, and includes a bibliography.

1. Hale Walker, general plan, 1935.

2. Early aerial photograph

3. Greenbelt Lake

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