ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: ACTS OF LIVELIHOOD: BODIES AND NATURE IN INTERNATIONAL GARDEN CITY MOVEMENT PLANNING, 1898-1937 Samuel M. Clevenger Doctor of Philosophy, 2018 Dissertation directed by: Professor David L. Andrews Department of Kinesiology Urban planning and reform scholars and policymakers continue to cite the “garden city” community model as a potential blueprint for planning environmentally sustainable, economically equitable, humane built environments. Articulated by the British social reformer Sir Ebenezer Howard and his 1898 book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, the model represented a method for uniting the benefits of town and country through a singular, pre-planned, “healthy” community, balancing spaces of “countryside” and “nature” with affordable, well-built housing and plentiful cultural attractions associated with city life. The book catalyzed an early twentieth-century international movement for the promotion and construction of garden cities. Howard’s garden city remains a highly influential context in the history of town planning and urban public health reform, as well as more recent environmentally-friendly urban design movements. To date, while historians have long examined the garden city as an agent of social and spatial reform, little analysis has been devoted to the role of prescribed embodiment and deemed “healthy” physical cultural forms and practices in the promotion and construction of garden cities as planned communities for “healthy living.” Informed by recent scholarship in Physical Cultural Studies (PCS), embodied environmental history, cultural materialism, and theories of modern biopower, this dissertation studies the cultural history of international garden city movement planning in early twentieth century Britain and the United States. Studying archival materials related to some of the prominent planners and resultant communities of the movement, I focus on the biopolitical dimensions of the planners’ contextual designs for “nature,” “health,” and “healthy” physical culture as they devised material garden city community layouts. I argue that the intentional British and American garden cities created during the movement were planned as spatialized strategies for the regeneration of laboring bodies through organized, bourgeois physical cultural practices and access to nostalgic spaces of “naturally healthy environments and outdoor recreation. ACTS OF LIVELIHOOD: BODIES AND NATURE IN INTERNATIONAL GARDEN CITY MOVEMENT PLANNING, 1898-1937 by Samuel M. Clevenger Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2018 Advisory Committee: Dr. David L. Andrews, Chair Dr. Shannon L. Jette Dr. Jennifer D. Roberts Dr. Stefano Villani Dr. Thomas Zeller, Dean’s Rep. © Copyright by Samuel M. Clevenger 2018 Dedication This entire dissertation is dedicated to the late Dr. Ronald Schultz, my former graduate adviser and Professor of History at the University of Wyoming. Thank you for your wisdom, your mentorship, and your kindness. It was through your teaching that I learned to think through the uses and politics of “theory”. Thank you for responding to every email, for helping me work through my concerns and worries, and for showing me the path to becoming an insightful scholar of history. I am sorry I did not finish this in time for you to see me defend it. ii Acknowledgements Inevitably, I am going to forget important people in my life who helped me see my graduate studies to fruition. To those of you who I have forgotten to acknowledge, thank you for being a source of strength, guidance, and love in my life. My interests underpinning this dissertation did not originate during my doctoral studies at Maryland, but during my graduate studies in American frontier mythology at the University of Wyoming. It were there, as I learned from the Department of History’s wonderful, insightful scholars, that I began to develop skills in historical and theoretical analysis. Special thanks to Dr. Phil Roberts, the late Dr. Ronald Schultz, Dr. Michael Brose, Dr. Isadora Helfgott, and Dr. Marianne Kamp for their mentorship during my time in Laramie. To my cohort at the University of Wyoming, especially Helen McBride, Robert Lang, Janet Youngholm, and Blaine Nelson, thank you for the comradery as we embarked on our scholarly journeys together. To Eric Stiles, wherever you are now, thank you. David Andrews: I am still only beginning to realize how much I have learned from you as a scholar, mentor, and intellectual of the highest degree. Thank you for seeing past my first couple years of stubbornness as a graduate student while in the program, for handling my constant spurts of “maverick” behavior with understanding, warmth, and wisdom, and for helping me pursue my research interests as they constantly wandered. I could not have asked for a better adviser. During my first year in the PCS program, I would call my former professors back in Wyoming, worried and wondering if I should go back to a history program. When I told them your ideas, guidance and teaching, they told me to trust you and what you were iii imparting. Ronald Schultz told me to follow what you taught about British Cultural Studies, Raymond Williams and Paul Willis. They were absolutely right. I will always be grateful that I stayed in the PCS program and worked under your advisement. If I become a quarter of the scholar you are, I will retire satisfied. Damion Thomas: thank you for all of your help, guidance, and advice my first two years at Maryland. I will be forever grateful for the chance to learn for you, and only wish I could have been able to work with you to the end of my studies. I came to the University of Maryland to study under your tutelage, and I will always consider you my adviser. Thomas Zeller and Stefano Villani: I feel so fortunate to have learned from both of you. You both stand as exemplars of the kind of historian I hope to become. Every time I got the chance to speak with each of you over in the History Department, I left with a renewed sense of the power and possibilities of doing good historical work. I only wish that I had more chances to learn from both of you during my tenure at Maryland. Thank you so much for showing me how a brilliant historian works, thinks, and teaches. Shannon Jette, Jennifer Roberts, Michael Friedman, and Lee Vander Velden: it was an honor and a privilege to learn from you, receive your feedback about presentations and papers, as well as consistent, productive encouragement at journal club meetings and program events. You constantly showed me what it means to be a good, thoughtful scholar. I can’t thank you enough. Stephen Roth: I was so scared and worried about transferring from a history to a kinesiology graduate program. You showed me that a good scholar is one who can iv hear and appreciate ideas and concerns regardless of area of expertise or disciplinary boundary. Thank you for your guidance, kind advice, and help throughout the years. The Kinesiology Department office staff past and present, especially Polly Sebastian Schurer, Jessica Duque, Bianca Garcia, Regina Clary, and Kumbhel Balde: I will never be able to fully repay you for your tireless, generous assistance. It is you who keeps the department boat afloat. Thank you so much for your help. My PCS graduate cohort past and present, especially Oliver Rick, Bryan Clift, Jake Bustad, Amber Wiest, Julie Maier, Shaun Edmonds, Meir Lewin, and Katie Esmonde. I could not have asked for a better, more challenging group of peers and colleagues. If I graduate with a better, more nuanced, critical understanding of physical culture beyond random diatribes about E.P. Thompson, it is because of your helping hands, generosity, and insightful research. Thank you for helping me grow as a student, and I hope I have helped do the same for you. I met wonderful scholars, librarians, and strangers during my archival research travels in the United Kingdom and United States. I wish I could remember and list all of your names. Thank for your kindness, help, and expertise. This dissertation research was made possible by the generous funding of the Department of Kinesiology’s Graduate Research Initiative Project (GRIP), the Whitlark International Research Fellowship, and the John Nolen Research Fund at Cornell University. I would not have been able to make it this far without the love and support of my dear family and friends. Thank you, all of you. All of this is for you. v Table of Contents Dedication ..................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ......................................................................................................... vi List of Figures ............................................................................................................ viii Introduction: Something Gained by the History of Garden Cities! .............................. 1 A Garden City Embodied Environmental History .................................................... 9 A Physical Cultural Studies Historical Dissertation ............................................... 14 A “Cultural Materialist” History of Garden City Planning .................................... 20 A Garden City History of