The Three Magnets diagram since its original publication in 1898 has often been mis-read from their original context and be mobilised in new ways.
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| The Three Magnets from Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 1902 Ebenezer Howard Photograph: Ebenezer Howard |
The Three Magnets occupies the first pages of the parliamentary record keeper turned social reformer Ebenezer Howard’s 1898 To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform and the revised and more commonly known 1902 version, Garden Cities of To-Morrow.
The diagram summarises the political, economic, and social context underlying Howard’s utopian vision for the future of British settlement via three illustrated magnets. One magnet lists the advantages and disadvantages of town life and another is accompanied by the positives and negatives of country life. The third magnet communicates Howard’s proposal of a Town-Country.
In the centre are The People who, having previously been stuck with a difficult choice between town and country lifestyle, will now be attracted to Howard’s proposal. Such a re-arrangement would provide the basis for a more prosperous, co-operative and liberated human experience and is a direct response to the plight of Victorian workers torn between inner-city slum conditions and a lack of opportunities afforded by more rural settings.
Other well-known images from Howard’s text include a series of diagrams that show how a hypothetical Garden City would be structured, how it would be situated relative to a larger city and how multiple Garden Cities would be networked to one another via central cities.
These are easier to mis-interpret than The Three Magnets because it is visually ambiguous as to whether they refer to geographic or organisational structures. Figure 2, titled Garden City shows how an individual city would be structured, a density of housing occupying 1,000 acres at the centre, with the surrounding 5,000 acres allocated to agriculture, welfare provision and leisure activities.
It has a grid and a scale and locates particulars ranging from an asylum for the blind and deaf to boulevards, parks, bridges and railway stations.
The Three Magnets diagram has travelled widely since its original publication. For over a century, nearly all students of architecture, town and city planning have encountered these images as part of their studies, often as slides in urban, architectural, or landscape history texts and lectures.
Urban Historian Sir Peter Hall noted that Howard has often been mis-read in this context, arguing that a close reading of the text, which many students never engage with directly, confirms that the images present diagrammatic proposals for a broader socio-economic concept rather than geographically specific proposals.
This highlights the ease with which images can be isolated from the original contexts of their production and be mobilised in new ways. Howard had a substantial impact on Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker’s original 1904 diagram for Letchworth Garden City following on Howard’s initiative.
However, as Hall points out, their interpretation implements aspects of the literal layout of the diagram, such as the provision of a densely settled centre surrounded by less populated farmlands and recreation grounds without full regard for Howard’s broader social project which, for example, gave consideration to provision of locally based economic and employment opportunities.
This kind of slippage is even more common today given the kinds of geographic information systems and 3D visualisation software often employed by contemporary urban designers and architects. Many of these tools, which are based on the same technologies used by the cinema and visual effects industry, favour a more precise and visually detailed presentation than might be appropriate for the concepts being expressed.
While a photo-realistic rendering of an unbuilt park or urban square can be more accessible than a diagram or schematic, it can have the effect of closing down, rather than opening, possibilities for the future.
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