2nd opinion: The garden city geezer

Ebenezer the garden city geezer. So George Bernard Shaw called him, and the image has stuck: a funny-looking man who lived a long time ago and wrote a book no one has read in years. He founded a fuddy-duddy organisation now called the Town and Country Planning Association, which continues to rant about garden cities. Worse, they've produced a facsimile of his book, with a commentary that only historians would want to read.

None of this could be further from the truth. Ebenezer Howard was a man of action. He corralled top businesspeople to join the board of his first garden city at Letchworth, and succeeded in building two garden cities. More, his work led directly to more than 30 new towns in the UK, plus countless examples abroad.

Go back to the funny book – To-morrow – and you'll find it full of amazing insights. Howard proposed harnessing wind power to pump water. He wrote pages on how to create municipal organisations open to the people. He spent most time on how to appropriate land values for the public – a problem we're grappling with today.

So Howard is relevant, now as then. Of course, circumstances are different. We no longer have 25% of Londoners living in destitution. Despite creeping inequality, the great majority have bathrooms and central heating, unknown to all but the very rich a century ago.

But we again have a huge need for affordable housing. We know, from a Joseph Rowntree Foundation study, how badly we are falling behind. Until recently, the government just sat and watched.

Now they've acted. The Communities Plan recognised what the fuddy-duddies had been saying: 40% of new homes would need to be built on greenfield, 60% in the South-east outside London. In 2003 as in 1903, when Letchworth began, most people aspire to a house with a garden.

The government wants new housing to be built at 30-40 dwellings per hectare. The Town and Country Planning Association has no problem with that: 30 per hectare equates to the 12 per acre recommended by Raymond Unwin, Letchworth's architect, in 1912. Nor would it deny that, in London, we can provide family houses with gardens at twice that density, as in Notting Hill and Islington. But we doubt the wisdom of super-densities, save in islands of high accessibility for special groups such as single-person households. They should never be tried on the most vulnerable, lone mothers with young children. That way lies disaster, as in the high-rise experiments of the 1960s.

The Communities Plan shows the scale of the task: 370,000 new homes up the M1/A6 corridor; 250,000-500,000 up the M11; 300,000 in the Thames Gateway. Studies indicate that we will need either extensions of new towns such as Milton Keynes, Northampton and Corby, or brand new towns next to Stansted and Cambridge and on Kent Thamesside. The principle of the new town or garden city was never more relevant or urgent.

To use an overworked word, it's also sustainable. If we return to Howard's forgotten diagram of Social City we see that, by clustering smaller units into groups along public transport spines, we can achieve small-town living with access to the employment, services and leisure that only large cities can offer.

There's a challenge to start creating a new generation of sustainable social cities along these corridors. The TCPA, now in its second century, will be there. And the garden city geezer, wherever he may be, will be proud of us.