Apple’s Tim Cook Says That He Is ‘Proud to Be Gay’

By BRIAN X. CHEN and VINDU GOEL NY TIMES

 

In a speech on Oct. 27, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, urged his home state of Alabama to move faster on ensuring equality for all.

SAN FRANCISCO — Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, likes to tell people that his predecessor, Steven P. Jobs, urged him to be himself when he took over the company.

Mr. Cook is taking that advice. On Thursday, he said he was gay — the most striking example of how he is in many ways making Apple a more open, less secretive company.

"Let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me," Mr. Cook wrote in HYPERLINK

Mr. Cook’s decision is unlikely to have any major impact on Apple’s global business, said business analysts and professors. But they added that because it was a bold move, it was full of unknowns. No business executive of Mr. Cook’s stature has ever done something like this before. And while laws legalizing same-sex marriage are sweeping places like the United States, Latin America and Europe, gay rights advocates are still struggling to secure basic protections in Asia, where Apple generated 27 percent of its revenue in the fourth quarter.

Countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore have laws that punish homosexuality. In China, the site of many of the factories that produce Apple gadgets, there are no legal protections for gays and lesbians, and the government occasionally cracks down on rights advocates.

On Chinese social media, some homophobic jokes made the rounds, and Mr. Cook’s sexuality ranked as the top issue on China’s Twitter-like microblog Weibo. Users alternately supported Mr. Cook or hit out at homosexuality. The chief executive of the antivirus and search engine company Qihoo 360, Zhou Hongyi, joked by questioning whether Chinese tech leaders would imitate Mr. Cook and come out of the closet, just as so many copy Mr. Jobs’s style of presentation.

Still, it seemed unlikely that consumer interest in Apple products or its business partnerships in Asia would be damaged.

"They’re not going to throw him out, or shut down Apple companies, because it will be bad for their business and bad for their economy," said Grace Poore, director of Asia and Pacific Island programs at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.

At home, Mr. Cook’s decision to be public about his sexual orientation typified how Apple has changed under his three years of management. The culture of secrecy Mr. Jobs fostered, with considerable success, also extended to his personal life, about which he was notoriously guarded. For years, he resisted pressure to disclose details of his health, even as he became visibly ill.

That stands in remarkable contrast with Mr. Cook, who seemed driven by personal beliefs rather than any sort of business needs in his decision to acknowledge what was already well known in Silicon Valley.

If Mr. Jobs’s larger-than-life persona defined Apple for many years, Mr. Cook’s more down-to-earth personality is increasingly defining Apple in an era when it is the most valuable tech company in the world and easily one of the most influential companies in the United States.

While Apple remains secretive about its products, Mr. Cook has been far more vocal about issues like the environment and human rights, and how the company’s products interact with the gear made by other firms. Apple’s willingness to work with other companies is a timely change given that it, like others in the industry, must learn to play nice with smaller outfits so they can be the nerve center of increasingly complex home computing networks.

Within the tech industry, Mr. Cook’s essay was generally lauded. Silicon Valley, with its nonstop focus on the future and its location in one of the most socially liberal parts of the country, has long been publicly supportive of gays and lesbians. Major tech companies field large contingents in San Francisco’s annual gay pride parade, with some industry leaders, including Facebook’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, and Mr. Cook, personally leading their companies’ marchers.

The Valley has also been ahead of the curve in extending employee benefits to same-sex partners and spouses. But tech companies, particularly start-ups founded and staffed largely by young white men, have struggled to deal with a fraternitylike workplace atmosphere inhospitable to women and gay people. Silicon Valley has few prominent executives who are openly gay.

"Thank you Tim for showing what it means to be a real, courageous and authentic leader," Mr. Zuckerberg wrote on his social network as he shared Mr. Cook’s essay with his followers.

Rob Glaser, chief executive of Real Networks, a maker of media player software in Seattle, said in an interview that Mr. Cook’s step was "hugely positive."

"Life is about role models," said Mr. Glaser, who has worked in the tech industry for three decades. "If you’re a 14-year old kid and you find the C.E.O. of one of the most iconic companies in the world happens to be gay, you’ll think, ‘There’s no limit on what I can do.’ "

　

Tim Cook's decision to come out as an openly gay male as an executive for a major tech company like Apple speaks volumes to the progress...

He said some of his gay friends still felt uncomfortable coming out and believed the industry discriminated against them. Mr. Cook’s public disclosure of his sexual orientation could help defuse the issue, he added.

Mr. Cook has been outspoken on gay rights for some time, though he has always stopped short of saying he himself was gay. Last year, for example, at an event on human rights hosted by Auburn University in Alabama, his alma mater, Mr. Cook said he had suffered discrimination in his own life but did not elaborate.

Earlier this week, Mr. Cook criticized the state of Alabama at a speech in Montgomery for being too slow to protect the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. He deplored the fact that people can still be fired for their sexual orientation in the state.

The sexuality of an executive has not had any visible effect on businesses in some other industries, like retail. Glen T. Senk, the former chief of Urban Outfitters, which owns the retail chain Anthropologie, is openly gay and said his sexuality did not have a visible effect on the company.

"I made a very conscious decision that if someone didn’t like it, they wouldn’t shop at Anthropologie," he said. "I never had the sense that it ever hurt Anthropologie or Urban Outfitters."

Mr. Cook’s decision comes at a high point for Apple. The company, based in Cupertino, Calif., recently reported strong financial results, thanks to booming sales of its latest iPhones. Mr. Cook has guided the company into the intriguing new wearable technology market with the Apple Watch. Apple’s shares are trading near a record high.

Samsung Electronics, Apple’s top competitor in smartphones, recently reported steep declines in profit because of shrinking smartphone sales.

"This is a golden moment for Apple," said Tero Kuittinen, a managing director for Frank N. Magid Associates, a technology research company. "Samsung looked a lot scarier a year ago."

Ben Bajarin, a consumer technology analyst for Creative Strategies, said that even though a vocal group of people disliked Apple, those sentiments had never had any meaningful impact. He said he expected Mr. Cook’s coming out to similarly have no impact on Apple’s business, even if people did not approve of his being gay.

Reporting was contributed by Conor Dougherty, Mike Isaac, Steve Lohr and Natasha Singer from New York; Matt Richtel from San Francisco; Nick Wingfield from Seattle; Paul Mozur from Hong Kong; Shanshan Wang from Beijing; and Mark Scott from London.

Thomas M. Menino, Mayor Who Led Boston’s Renaissance, Is Dead at 71

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE NY TIMES

Thomas M. Menino, Boston’s longest-serving mayor, who presided over one of the most successful urban renaissances in modern American history, died on Thursday in Boston. He was 71.

The cause was cancer, his spokeswoman, Dot Joyce, said.

Mr. Menino, a Democrat, was City Council president in 1993 when the sitting mayor left for an ambassadorship and he automatically became mayor. Dismissed early on as an "urban mechanic," Mr. Menino consolidated his power over two decades into one-man rule. In the process, he helped transform Boston into a thriving economic and cultural center and a magnet for innovation.

He left his imprint on the skyline, especially downtown and in South Boston, where empty warehouses and a decrepit waterfront gave way to glassy condos, corporate offices and upscale restaurants.

But even as he revitalized Boston’s urban core, protecting it from what he called "Manhattanization," Mr. Menino remained a creature of its neighborhoods. He spent his whole life in Hyde Park, where he was born. He would amble along the city’s streets, talking with residents, reporting potholes and rarely missing a ribbon cutting. In a remarkable achievement for a big-city mayor, he met more than half of Boston’s 625,000 residents in person, according to polls. He left office with approval ratings at an astronomical 82 percent.

Mr. Menino with President Bill Clinton in 1997 at a seminar at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Credit Gary Cameron/Reuters

"Bold, big-hearted and Boston strong, Tom was the embodiment of the city he loved and led for more than two decades," President Obama said Thursday in a statement.

Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York and native of the Boston region, once called Mr. Menino "the mayors’ mayor" and said he would be ranked with America’s greatest municipal chief executives, including Fiorello H. La Guardia of New York and Richard J. Daley and his son, Richard M., of Chicago.

Like those power brokers, Mr. Menino held an iron grip on his fief. He cultivated power, rewarding friends and intimidating foes. He favored certain developers, handing them tax breaks and unsnarling red tape, and received generous campaign contributions from them. Few construction projects were built without his approval. Some were altered to suit his tastes.

Notoriously thin-skinned, he nursed grudges, and his adversaries often ended up in the political wilderness. Mr. Menino, who never groomed an heir, suggested in his memoir, "Mayor for a New America," published this month, that the image of him as an autocrat was exaggerated but that he exploited it to maintain leverage.

"Fear is power," he wrote. "I owed it to my city to keep fear alive."

It was a formula that worked. He ended each fiscal year with an operating surplus, drove up the city’s bond rating and avoided being tarred with a major scandal.

In an academically minded city like Boston, which has called itself the Athens of America, Mr. Menino cut an incongruous figure. As a young man, he had no interest in college. While he championed a high-tech "innovation district," he was a technophobe.

And though he took lessons in public speaking, he never mastered the art. He swallowed his words, which were coated in a thick Boston accent, earning the nickname Mumbles; at political roasts, videos in which he appeared were affectionately labeled with subtitles. He had a penchant, too, for malapropisms, once saying that the lack of parking in the city was "an Alcatraz around my neck."

But he came to embody the spirit of Boston, never more so than after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, which left three people dead and 260 severely wounded.

On that day, he was recovering from ankle surgery. But as officials gathered to brief the news media on the bombings, Mr. Menino checked himself out of the hospital and arrived at the briefing in a wheelchair, groggy, a hospital bracelet on his wrist.

A few days later, at a prayer service, he struggled to rise from his wheelchair, grimacing in obvious pain, to address the congregants, who included Mr. Obama.

"No adversity, no challenge, nothing can tear down the resilience in the heart of this city and its people," Mr. Menino said from the pulpit.

He never aspired to higher office, which helped account for his longevity in the office he loved. He was not a visionary. "Visionaries don’t get things done," he said. Rather, he focused on plowing the roads, fixing the streetlights and cleaning up the parks.

"I’m not good-looking," he once said. "I can’t speak well. I’m not smart." But he added: "I’m driven. I have the opportunity to change people’s lives."

His proudest accomplishment, he told The New York Times in 2012, was making the city more hospitable to immigrants and minorities, particularly after the violent upheaval in the 1970s over court-ordered busing to integrate the public schools.

"My No. 1 thing is bringing racial harmony to the city," he said.

He attributed his empathy for immigrants and outsiders to being an ethnic minority, Italian-American, in a city dominated by the Irish. And he watched his mother help neighbors with their problems and struggles. He was the city’s first Italian-American mayor and its first mayor not of Irish descent since 1930.

"My No. 1 thing is bringing racial harmony to the city". The social atmosphere is so markedly different from the Kevin White years. Mayor...

Ideologically, he was a liberal Democrat representing a liberal Democratic base. He pushed for tougher federal gun laws and refused to march in South Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade because it excluded gays. He was among the first mayors to extend benefits to same-sex partners of city employees.

He sat atop a powerful political machine, kept humming by an army of loyal city workers who helped him rack up enviable vote totals in all his bids for re-election.

"Menino has assembled the most extensive political operation in modern Boston history over his 16 years in office, rivaling that of legendary mayor James Michael Curley," The Boston Globe wrote in 2009. "He’s done it the old-fashioned way, by blurring the lines between politics and policy, between city work and campaign work, delivering services to everyday residents and warnings to his rare foes — many of them intended to strengthen his electoral standing."

He occasionally activated his machine on behalf of others. In 2008, he sent 100 of his "campaign pros" next door to New Hampshire to help Hillary Rodham Clinton in her difficult presidential primary against Barack Obama. He claimed in his memoir that his team "put Hillary over the top."

Still, there were challenges that Mr. Menino could not overcome. While student test scores improved, he fell short of his promise to overhaul the city’s public schools. Housing was another problem area. The city created millions of dollars of high-priced housing and left longtime residents priced out of their newly gentrified neighborhoods.

Thomas Michael Menino was born on Dec. 27, 1942, in Hyde Park. His grandparents, who occupied the first floor of the family home, had emigrated from Italy. His father was a factory foreman at Westinghouse Electric.

Mr. Menino graduated from high school in 1960 and briefly attended night classes at Boston College but dropped out, saying college was not for him. Besides, he said, his hero, Harry S. Truman, never attended college. But Mr. Menino later regretted that decision, and in 1988, at age 45, finally earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Out of high school, he sold insurance for Metropolitan Life. He met his future wife, Angela Faletra, in 1963 when they were playing tennis on adjacent courts. They married three years later and had two children, Susan and Thomas Jr. In addition to his wife and children, he is survived by a brother, David; a sister, Carolyn Phipps; and six grandchildren.

Mr. Menino quickly migrated to politics, working on local campaigns and getting elected to the City Council in 1983. A decade later, when President Bill Clinton appointed Mayor Raymond Flynn ambassador to the Vatican, Mr. Menino rose to the corner office. He won election later that year to a full term and served four more full terms.

His decision last year not to seek an unprecedented sixth term was excruciating for him. In October 2012, felled by various ailments, he was hospitalized for two months and underwent a lengthy convalescence. The city — and several would-be mayors with pent-up ambition — watched and waited to see whether he would run again.

In March 2013, in an emotional ceremony in Faneuil Hall packed with the city’s power elite and its working classes, Mr. Menino said he would not seek re-election. He said he had run out of steam and could not manage the city the way he wanted.

He left office in January at age 71 and took a position at Boston University. In February, he was found to have an advanced form of inoperable cancer that had metastasized. Still, for several months, he showed up around town, assuming an unofficial role as mayor emeritus.

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

Britain’s housing crisis: are garden cities the answer?

They’re billed as an idyllic alternative to generic commuter towns. But the first of a new generation of garden cities, in Ebbsfleet, Kent, has run into controversy. Will the end result be bog-standard suburban housing blighting the green belt?

 

Patrick Barkham   The Guardian          

Ebbsfleet Garden City S.E. London England October 2014 

An aerial view of Ebbsfleet showing the quarry and valley developments with Swanscombe to the rear – and London in the distance at top left. Photograph: Commission Air Ltd                                    

Beyond the shops – a Co-op, a cafe, a tattoo studio called Demon Inkorporation – are narrow terraced streets where doors open on to the pavement. A newer red-brick estate has been erected on an old slurry pit, and in the distance are wind turbines, pylons, the roar of the A2 and the surreal sight of container ships the size of tower blocks slipping down the Thames.

Welcome to Britain’s newest garden city. Ebbsfleet, the name of the high-speed Eurostar railway station squeezed on to waste ground between Dartford and Gravesend, is the first of the government’s new generation of garden cities: low-density communities with generous green spaces and good local facilities. Garden cities are an idea whose time has come (again), enjoying the support of George Osborne, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg. They are seen as a way to persuade not-in-my-backyarders to tolerate urgently needed new housing estates. Are garden cities the solution to Britain’s housing crisis? Or are they a sham – the same-old suburbs smothering precious green belt?

This debate was ignited by David Rudlin, an urban designer who last month won the £250,000 Wolfson Economics prize for arguing we must “take a confident bite out of the green belt” and build new garden city extensions to around 40 existing provincial cities and towns, including Oxford, Taunton, Ipswich and Carlisle.

Politicians, architects and planners all say that the housing crisis – which means all but the seriously rich are priced out of booming cities and all but the super-rich are priced out of London – is only going to get worse: demographic trends suggest that 6m new homes are required over the next 30 years. That means 200,000 each year, and in England we have struggled to build half that – just 112,630 new homes – in the 12 months to March 2014.

Garden cities were the vision of a shorthand typist called Ebenezer Howard who worked in parliament and, in 1898, outlined his utopian alternative to industrial slums, combining the best of town and country. Howard’s vision of self-sufficient local communities of affordable homes built at a low density with green spaces and jobs nearby was realised through first Letchworth and then Welwyn Garden City. Letchworth offered affordable renting and home ownership (a three-bedroom house cost £175 in 1906), leisure facilities such as a nine-hole golf course and innovations including Britain’s first roundabout. Lenin is rumoured to have stayed the night in the town in 1907 and the garden city ideals were exported abroad, to Soviet cities including Stalingrad, and other new cities such as Canberra, Australia.

Workmen’s cottage in Letchworth in 1912. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City’s generous public spaces and green, low-density avenues are still so popular that Lord Wolfson, the funder of the Wolfson prize and a generous Tory donor, believes they could solve the conundrum of how to construct thousands of new homes without alienating greenbelt-loving locals. But the idea of building on green belt – as advocated by Rudlin – is still toxic to top Tories: it has been sharply dismissed by the Conservatives’ housing minister and also criticised by the architect Lord Rogers, a champion of urban renewal through brownfield development. George Osborne, the chancellor, has stuck to Tory-friendly territory by earmarking brownfield land around Ebbsfleet for the first of the new garden cities. Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, has invited local authorities to bid for funding of up to £2.4bn for three more.

The desolate picture glimpsed from a high-speed train rushing through Ebbsfleet might confirm sceptics’ suspicions that garden cities are a hollow rebranding exercise. “To call this a garden city is satire,” wrote Simon Jenkins earlier this year. But a closer look at the new – and old – communities in this part of Kent reveals a more complicated picture.

Ebbsfleet is promising on paper. There is probably no better place to build a sizeable new town in south-east England. It has an underused high-speed railway station. A canyon-sized disused quarry already has outline planning permission for 10,000 new homes; more have been approved on adjacent brownfield sites. On marshy industrial land by the Thames, Paramount wants to build a £2bn attraction, bigger than the Olympic Park, which will create 27,000 local jobs. To the west is Bluewater shopping centre. Its malls can be linked up by a “Fastrack” bus system already partly in place. Osborne has promised £200m to help and, more significantly, an urban development corporation to speed up planning consent and cooperation between the two borough councils – Labour-controlled Gravesham and Conservative Dartford. Crucially, both councils also support the garden city.

In the cavernous Eastern Quarry, the first residents will move into their homes this month. Ebbsfleet may not currently look particularly scenic but it doesn’t take much imagination to see that this quarry community could be rather lovely. The developer, Land Securities, has spent more than £100m buying and landscaping the site, creating a south-facing slope down to natural lakes. Wooded quarry walls hide the A2 and most of the old industry. Land Securities has already adopted garden city-style principles: 6,000 homes will be arranged in three “villages” with central squares featuring local shops and schools. There will be safe footpaths for children and a green boulevard along which buses will whisk residents to the station, Bluewater or the Paramount development.

Jeremy Kite, leader of Dartford borough council, is confident that Ebbsfleet won’t become another commuter dormitory. “There’s nothing better than a village, whether it’s an urban village or something in the Cotswolds,” he says. “We’ve got local shops – they happen to be Bluewater – we’ve got a local railway station that happens to be 17 minutes from central London and we’ve got a playground which we happen to call Paramount theme park. If we get this right, it should be a really good model community. The notion that a resident would say, ‘My dream is to commute back and forth to Canary Wharf’ is nonsense. It shouldn’t be a dorm, it should be an importer rather than an exporter of people during the day.”

There is one problem with Ebbsfleet garden city: there is already a town here. It is called Swanscombe. The 14,000 residents of Swanscombe and Greenhithe are not the usual Nimbys – I cannot find anyone who is opposed to the new garden city – but many feel like they are being erased from the map.

“The development is not the problem – the problem is everyone is telling us what we need instead of asking us what we want,” says Bryan Read, leader of Swanscombe and Greenhithe town council. “Swanscombe has a lot of history,” he explains as he takes me on a grand tour of the immaculate town hall, community centre and national nature reserve. This became the first geological reserve in the country after a south-London dentist called Alvin Marston found a skull here in 1935. “Swanscombe Man” (now thought to be a woman) was 400,000 years old and lived alongside tigers, cave lions and elephants. Now, her descendants are furious about their disappearing heritage.

A sign shows the names of potential development areas in Ebbsfleet. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

“The people of Swanscombe are up in arms about the name ‘Ebbsfleet’, which is a name made up by Eurostar,” says Jeff Harvey, another town councillor. “They are not opposed to the development but to the erasing of our identity. Swanscombe is so steeped in history I don’t know why they want to disregard us. Over the years, people have suffered from the ‘regeneration’ building work and they haven’t had anything back. We’re just not even thought about.”

Developers are alert to community feeling – concerns over the Ebbsfleet name are “a proxy for wider concerns about being left behind”, acknowledges a spokesperson for Land Securities – but it is no wonder local residents feel excluded: the map of the proposed area covered by Ebbsfleet’s urban development corporation includes land all around Swanscombe but misses out the entire existing community. Locals fear the garden city will flourish, leaving Swanscombe its impoverished middle. “It looks like there’ll be a fence around us, or probably a wall,” laughs Harvey, half-joking. “It’s a nice estate, the quarry, but it’s going to spruce up the area and leave Swanscombe looking like a ghetto – it’s a them-and-us type situation.”

Read is desperate to see the necessary road, rail and bus improvements to link old and new communities and stop garden city gridlock. And it is on these infrastructural questions (rather than aesthetics – there is no reason why a garden city can’t be built on brownfield land) that Ebbsfleet falls short of the garden city ideal. It may receive some government subsidies but Ebbsfleet is being built in a largely standard way – with developers compelled to fund modest infrastructural improvements. Rudlin’s prize-winning vision of a new generation of garden cities is much more radical, and based on reviving the garden-city economic model last used for postwar new towns in Britain.

Is Ebbsfleet a garden city? “I wouldn’t say so,” says Rudlin. “It’s a housing estate styled as a garden city. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but the aspirations of a garden city can be higher than that.”

At the core of the housing crisis, says Rudlin, are crazy prices – of homes and land. The big winners are landowners. The value of land can rise 200-fold once it has planning permission; this bonanza means that landowners pay huge fees to planning professionals to get planning permission; together, they pocket the huge uplift in the value of the land. Developers are forced to pay so much for land that they can only afford to build cheap standardised homes. “This awful suburbia around our cities is the result of this dysfunctionality of our planning system,” thinks Rudlin.

His big idea is to revive the legislation that created new towns, with a revived “garden cities act” enabling the government to buy land at its “real” pre-planning permission price, as occurs in Germany and the Netherlands. When this land is sold for construction, the money made is used by each new “garden city foundation” to fund proper infrastructure. This more centrally planned model enables plots with infrastructure to be offered to people to build their own homes (or commission a local builder to do so). The popularity of Grand Designs suggests we would love this. And “the number of self-builds in Italy, Austria and France is huge”, says Rudlin. A “plot passport” would prevent the construction of ugly monstrosities, and self-builders, alongside the familiar high-volume house-builders would help hit the annual 200,000 new homes target.

Unfortunately, the politicians who have been quick to apparently embrace garden cities don’t seem to be seriously considering reviving their economic and legislative underpinning. Is there a danger Osborne and Clegg’s adoption of garden cities is just a way to rebadge the same old bog-standard suburban house-building? “Of course there is,” admits Rudlin. “That’s what happened with the original garden cities. Many of them are a pale shadow of what Ebenezer Howard suggested they would be. That’s the downside of an idea that gets traction – people will always take it and water it down and use it as branding rather than content.”

Houses in Welwyn Garden City, the epitome of Ebenezer Howard’s idea of new housing. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

For critics of garden cities, however, they are not the solution but part of the problem. Lord Rogers and the Campaign to Protect of Rural England have both argued we must build on brownfield land before biting into the green belt as Rudlin suggests. Rogers says at least 1.3m fairly low-density dwellings could be built on suitable brownfield land; there are also 400,000 homes with planning permission not yet built. The influential architect fears Rudlin’s garden cities would become car-dependent suburbs that risk emptying existing cities. In response, Rudlin argues that brownfield is not always available where houses are needed. “You can’t just build a load of houses in a northern mill town,” says Rudlin. “If you’re going to accept you don’t grow Oxford – where there are few brownfields and huge pressure for growth – but you do grow Burnley then you’ve got to have a national policy [to tackle geographical economic imbalances].” From an ecological perspective, brownfield is sometimes far more precious than arable green belt, as demonstrated by the controversy over 5,000 homes planned for an old Ministry of Defence site at Lodge Hill, not far from Ebbsfleet. This overgrown barracks is now the best site in the country for endangered nightingales.

Other planning experts fear that garden cities will only worsen the housing crisis. Each morning, Adrian Jones, a town planner and author of Towns in Britain, watches trains from Welwyn Garden City, packed with commuters, pass his London home. “Garden cities were to be self-sufficient communities, not dormitory suburbs,” he says. “There’s a huge nexus of planning and transport issues around the concentration of jobs, power and investment in London. A few more garden cities doesn’t solve the problem, it exacerbates it.” According to Jones, the housing crisis was caused by selling off public housing; it can be solved by building it again. Far better to rent from a public agency than a private one, argues Jones, not least because the public body can borrow money more cheaply than a private landlord.

Given the drastic forecast that we need 6m new homes over the next three decades, is a more radical rethink required? Frances Holliss, an architect and academic at London Metropolitan University, identifies garden cities as part of the source of the housing crisis. Victorian social reformers were horrified by urban slums where home-workers were appallingly exploited. Alongside the provision of new social housing, Howard’s garden cities helped establish a principle still embedded in planning regulations today: the separation of work and home. Many social housing tenancy agreements, for example, still prohibit running a business from home. This has created what Holliss sees as “an enormous amount of wastage in our building stock”: homes are empty in the day; huge offices are desolate at night (to say nothing of the money and energy wasted on commuting between them). If more people were allowed to work from home, and offices and industrial spaces were not prohibited as places to live, argues Holliss, we wouldn’t need to construct so many new buildings on green or brown fields. “We need to be more flexible about how we inhabit buildings. Home-based work has a role in terms of making building stock more efficient. We have the potential to inhabit a very wide range of buildings as combined dwellings and workplaces if we can only loosen up the rules. I really don’t believe we need to build more; we need to inhabit what we’ve got in a far more imaginative way.”