In 1898 Ebenezer Howard published “To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform” (later “Garden Cities of To-morrow”) and introduced his urban and territorial model of Garden Cities into the planning debate. With rural migration and the poor residential conditions of the working class as a starting point, Howard proposes the decentralisation of the urban population into nuclei of no more than 400 hectares of urban land surrounded by 2,000 hectares of agricultural land. These nuclei would house a maximum population of 32,000 inhabitants and would be connected to the Central City and to each other by railways.

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Howard, Ebenezer (1902) Garden Cities of To-morrow

In the late 1920s, at the dawn of the automobile era, Clarence Perry coined the concept of the Neighbourhood Unit, a planning scheme aimed at designing the local as its own entity within the city as a whole. Perry defined four basic pillars for its design: the primary school, green spaces, local commerce and the design of the residential environment. The primary school, in the centre, served to size the total population and, although he did not establish a specific maximum area, he did stipulate that the Neighbourhood Unit should be delimited by arterial traffic routes and crossed by a network of streets designed for pedestrian mobility.

Read more:
Perry, Clarence (1929). The Neighborhood Unit, a Scheme for Arrangement for the Family-Life Community en The Regional Plan of New York and its Environs (Vol. VII Neighborhood and Community Planning) New York: Russell Sage Foundation

Carpio-Pinedo, J., Pozo Menéndez, E., Lamíquiz Daudén, F.J. et al. When a city must be a tree: rethinking the spatial approach to fighting epidemics based on the notion of ‘intermediate confinement’. Urban Des Int 26, 332–347 (2021)

The city (and region) of short distances (stadt der kurzen Wege) emerged in the 1990s, in the midst of the debate on sustainable urban development. It is defined as a city or region in which conditions exist that make it possible to carry out everyday tasks and to reach the place of work or study in a short time and without having to rely on the car. Its key characteristics are a compact urban structure, a mix of uses, accessibility to services, attractive design of public space and public transport-oriented regional development.

Read more:
Beckmann, K. J., Thiemann-Linden, J., Preuß, T., & Gies, J. (2011). Leitkonzept-Stadt und Region der kurzen Wege. Gutachten im Kontext der Biodiversitätsstrategie.