There are 21 garden cities in Brussels, built largely during the interwar period. The twin sites of Le Logis and Floréal are perhaps the finest; a stunning amalgam of Flemish craft, pops of colour and a layout styled on an English village. A visit is strangely unsettling, walking a familiar urban plan built out in a slightly different language. White harled cottages lurk behind privet hedges, but with French-style wooden external shutters on the windows. Le Logis was created in 1922 to house civil servants and the employees of the General Pensions and Savings Fund. Floréal, an adjacent site – all yellow window trims and pantile roofs – was built a year later at the initiative of typesetter workers. Although it is described as one, it’s not really a garden city, more of a garden suburb, but it’s a corner of a Flanders field that is forever not-quite-English-suburbia.

It is always surprising to happen upon a garden city in some foreign clime: the outskirts of Espoo in Finland or on the freeway heading out to LAX, but they are always unmistakable and always not quite what was originally intended. When Ebenezer Howard wrote To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (later renamed Garden Cities of To-morrow), Britain was experiencing an apparently unique dual-pronged attack of rural depopulation and untamed growth of major urban centres. Howard proposed a series of small, planned cities that would offer all the attributes of urban life with ready access to nature. The plan went something like this: purchase a large area of agricultural land; lay out a compact town surrounded by a wide rural belt within it; accommodate residents, industry and agriculture within the rural belt; then, as it is built out by developers, recoup the natural rise in land-value tax that can then be used for the town’s own general welfare, including social housing.

It was a clever plan, which was invariably executed without the last fundamental component. At the beginning of the First World War the engineer and urban planner Raphaël Verwilghen went to Great Britain as director of the Office of Reconstruction of the Devastated Regions in the Ministry of Public Works for the Belgian government-in-exile. He took to the garden city concept because it suited Brussels in particular. The housing estates needed a green area on the city’s outskirts, of which there were many around Brussels, so the land was cheaper. Although not initially modernist, the homes used modern materials like concrete rather than brick or stone, which helped to cut costs and speed up the construction. Simplified and standardised, the homes were made special by their arrangement and the greenery that surrounded them. Pretty soon, what was just a British solution, became applicable elsewhere: Germany, Japan, Brazil and more.

We forget that Europe produced its own very identifiable suburbia. In the 21st century we look at it as an American condition, alien to Europe, which was imported thanks to the cultural hegemony of the United States, as if movies are upstream of urban planning. This was very much the conclusion of a recent exhibition at the Centro de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, which successfully explored the origins of American suburban expansion, only to imagine in the end that it magically transferred to Catalonia from there at the end of the 20th century, like a virus. As if the tight urban grid of the Eixample designed by Cerda was authentically European and the sprawl beyond was a late-20th-century foreign import. As Western European nations consider how they can address their underperformance in terms of housing provision in the last 20 years, during a period in which urban densification was the espoused position by policymakers, we should be very wary of this assumption.

The fact is that Europe – Western Europe in particular – became suburban, ironically, in response to the success of America’s rural economy. From the 1870s to 1890s wheat prices in Europe dipped as they came under pressure from Canadian and American imports. Across Europe farming revenues, and hence land-costs tumbled due to an extended depression in the agricultural economy. During this crisis, labour left the land, making urban development more necessary even if it was yet to be carefully organised. The malaise from which the British, German and Dutch rural economies never recovered, and which the French opted to address at great cost, put the establishment into paroxysms of self-doubt as they considered whether they should conserve a way of life or favour free trade and further damage the position of the landowning class. Some device needed to halt this malaise and the garden city satisfied both economic and cultural logics.

It is worth considering the British example in detail, partly because it addressed early this wider paradigm in terms of urban planning and hence became an example that was quickly picked up and adapted. The Housing, Town Planning, etc. Act 1909, introduced by a reforming Liberal government, is the key moment. The Act created a streamlined means for the way in which planning permissions could be granted, creating a central body to help councils perform this role. It codified existing building regulations, but gave councils the right to adapt size, heights and density if the need was articulated and genuine. It also contained possibilities for collective ownership and progressive land use. As a consequence, it is a useful model for considering today as developed nations wish to increase housing production.

The Act also enabled the dissemination and replication of perhaps the only great innovation in urban design made by the British. Henry Vivian, a former carpenter, helped establish the first co-operative garden suburb in Brentham, in West London. When he was elected a Liberal MP in 1906, he helped draft the Act, imbuing it with the spirit of a radical change in attitude to land: an entity that didn’t need custodianship so much as sharing; the value of it accruing not so much to an individual but to the nation as a whole. The Finance Act 1910 required private landowners to give the state a portion of the increase in the value of their land when public money was spent on communal developments. Uplift in land value created by development would thereby become an engine to further development – a principle of the garden city.

The Acts’ relevance is often overlooked, overshadowed as they are by the First World War and yet Britain’s greatest ever building boom took place not long after the cessation of hostilities, jump-started in 1919 by an addendum to the Act which provided subsidies. Despite a social and demographic crisis, a huge range of construction companies grew up to build housing on behalf of local authorities, charitable trusts and also, of course, private developers. The Act received support across all parties; from Tory Imperialists, appalled at the physical prowess of soldiers during the Boer War, who thought that it would reinvigorate the nation, to those in the burgeoning Labour party who saw in its provision for collective ownership and the seeds of a land tax a possibility of more homes and better conditions for workers. It reconciled a Britain that was dying with the one that was coming to be.

This idea of ignoring the Edwardians is not a complete accident, particularly when it comes to the architecture, rather than just the ambition, of urban planning. We have come to see the suburbs as somehow inferior, and urban centres of more value. If we look at Britain’s cities, not much seems to change or be produced because of the 1909 Act. John Betjeman, the great advocate and defender of Victorian architecture, was full of backhanded compliments on the set-piece urban architecture of the period. The Edwardians gave Britain’s cities a certain, very often French, flourish. ‘No large town in Britain is without an Edwardian dome or two,’ wrote Betjeman.

More alert to what really happened in this period was J.B. Priestley. Even though he ignores architecture altogether in his 1970 book The Edwardians, he understands the period’s dynamic better than Betjeman, who saw it as a footnote to the Victorian era. Priestley quotes the architect and craftsman Charles Robert Ashbee who left London and created an Arts and Crafts focused community in the Cotswolds. He declared the movement, as the 20th century began, as a force for ‘sound production on the one hand, and inevitable regulation of machine production and cheap labour on the other’. The Edwardians are the first to really address the cultural implications of the pandora’s box of industrialisation, in the built environment as opposed to products, in a large-scale way.

In his book, Priestley leaves his editor to offer up an image of appropriate architecture and she includes E.S. Priors’ Home Place in Norfolk as an example of this principle in architecture; a butterfly planned orgy of Arts and Crafts techniques. Built with a reinforced concrete frame, it was faced with local stone and topped with pantiled roofs made from Norfolk clay.

As Ashbee would have wished, these techniques were not just applied to the homes of the wealthy. Indeed, one of the characteristics of the period is that whatever styles progressive middle classes tried for themselves were attempted at scale. In 1905, the Cheap Cottages Exhibition at Letchworth Garden City explored different forms of mass construction; including concrete block-work frames clad in different materials. The industry was at least theoretically primed for the new pastures that the Act would open. These technologies, for better or worse, still define construction today.

In his seminal book The Edwardians and their Houses: The New Life of Old England, Timothy Brittain-Catlin examines the buildings that members of the government that introduced the Act went on to build themselves, as a means of exploring the wider changes taking place. By way of preface he makes the following astute comment: ‘Liberal architecture was as much about the old as it was about the new: as much about the land as about the building on it.’ Key figures such as the Earl of Carrington, a friend of King Edward VII, but also a proponent of the Land Nationalisation Company, were acutely aware of the need not so much to build houses, but to redistribute land ownership.

The activities of the Land Nationalisation Society, founded in 1881, fed with the radical ideas of John Stuart Mill and the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace (who conceived, simultaneously to Darwin, a theory of natural selection but was beaten to publication), opened up new horizons that informed the 1909 Act. Wallace proposed a gradual removal of ownership. A nominal ground rent based on the land’s value would be paid to the state for occupancy, while the tenant right would become ownership. Any sub-tenant would purchase the tenant right from wealthy landowners at a price determined by the difference between the ground-rent valuation and the average rent, like a mortgage. Co-op or credit unions would enable the poor to achieve similar rights.

In many ways it was these ideas, shared with radical thinkers in Europe, that provided the political backdrop to the suburbanisation of Europe. It is telling, for example, that in the new nations that were liberated by the collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires in 1918, a whole echelon of aristocratic landowners owing allegiance to the ancien regime were booted out. It is often assumed that Le Corbusier was looking forward when he offered the alternative ‘architecture or revolution’ in his book Vers Une Architecture, published in 1923. He was looking at the world around him.

Britain, out of this dilemma, got architecture. Brittain Catlin points out that although the 1909 Act is primarily about housing, it is also an attempt to manage the breakup of the great aristocratic land estates. The Earl of Carrington, for example, gave over his estate house to a school and moved into a refurbished farm building. These changes informed a new type of historically literate, profoundly English architecture; a way of reaching back into the pre-Victorian past not just for inspiration but for contextual material.

Radical toffs and liberals set the example, including the prime minister and his wife. To extend their home the Asquiths bought an agricultural building next door. As Brittain Catlin says, this was probably the first barn conversion in the modern sense, the adaptation and modernisation of an existing structure with minimum intervention for contemporary fashionable living. These buildings set an example. New homes might look like farm cottages, barns or byres. They would be pragmatic but, unlike the Modernist model of houses as machines, this was agricultural utilitarianism.

Brittain Catlin explores the example of Gidea Park in Romford, Essex to show the impact of the Act on building; exploring the feedback loop between the Garden City movement and the Act. ‘The entire atmosphere of the place, its founders, planners, judges and leading architects, emerged from the busy world of Edwardian romantic idealists and Art Workers’ Guild brethren,’ he writes.

The development of Gidea Park blended elements of the garden suburb movement with individual architectural creativity. This suburb, built on land purchased by political activist Herbert Raphael, was distinct from other planned communities such as Letchworth or Hampstead. The design competition allowed for a wide range of architectural styles, showcasing work that generally explored an architecture derived from Essex village houses from the 17th century, Tudor and Jacobean flourishes, although there were a number of Georgian villas.

Gidea is a key step in the creation of Britain’s suburban identity. It takes the world of increasingly kooky one-off Arts and Crafts historicist houses and applies it to the market, using mass produced elements. It doesn’t feature any work by CFA Voysey, but his influence is all over it; particularly his love of pre-Georgian architectural styles. One of the great eclectics of British architectural history, Voysey, by the time of the 1909 Act was as likely to throw in a pointed Gothic arch as a curved Jacobean one; to introduce thick, bulging medieval glass to doors as to modern clear ones. Parker and Unwin were perfecting the means of creating repeatable building types with light, clear reception spaces which could still be idiosyncratic, personal, different. As the country moved in the direction of democracy, this architecture was a means of making change legible. England was not dying, it was proliferating.

Visiting the area today is illuminating. Whereas Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City feature moments of overblown civic Georgian architecture, Gidea’s urban layout is unspectacular, with all the design happening on the individual plots: the coherence comes from the sense that one is half-way into the country. There are shared spaces, largely unused other than to suffuse the whole place with green. Although the homes with whitewashed, roughcast walls are striking and different, they boast all the features that we associate with suburban homes: dormer windows, casement windows, low slung roofs. One of the common features is the L-shaped plan framing the garden, almost fetishising it. Once you see it, it is impossible to unsee. This is as much about the land and the house that sits on it.

It is, of course, an incredibly desirable place to live now, but it was relatively so even when it was built. As land has become more expensive thanks to the unintended consequence of the 1948 Town Planning Act, the solidity and skill of the construction has given way to cheaper imitations in the postwar period. Just five miles west towards London is the largest private housing estate in Europe, Becontree, built predominantly in the 1920s.

There’s a lot wrong with that estate, such as the lack of greenery and its unpreparedness for mass- automobile ownership; ironic given that many of the people who lived there worked at the Dagenham Ford plant. But it shows how the effects of the 1909 Act played out on a grand scale for a new working class, as it is again and again, in more diluted, ever more grubby and haphazard ways, by monopolising housebuilders, working with snatches of land wrestled from public utilities or declining industry in a system that couldn’t have been designed better to keep land costs and housing prices high.

As Western Europe attempts to remedy its shortfall in housing, the focus tends to fall on the immediate postwar period. In West Germany, on average, over half a million houses were built each year throughout the 1950s. In Sweden, the large-scale Miljonprogrammet (Million Programme or Million Homes Programme) between 1965 and 1974 successfully provided one million modern, healthy public homes for a then-Swedish population of eight million. In the UK it is the 1948 Town Planning Act, a key part of the welfare state that dominates the British imaginary.

These, however, were the years in which we had top-down, command-style economies and, in many cases, Europe’s cities are reaching the extremities of their transport infrastructure and available land. We can only urbanise so far before we must build new settlements appended to or within the sphere of influence of existing cities.

It is to the period before that we are compelled to look, whether we like it or not. It is to the time when Europe moved from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban – and suburban – landscape that we must look for solutions. In the early 20th century, some countries underwent a land revolution, often thanks to the collapse of an imperial force, allowing them to make tenureship more egalitarian, the Czech Republic and Finland being the obvious examples.

What makes the United Kingdom such an interesting place to focus on is that, despite creating a model for land values to be shared in the garden city and despite the early enthusiasm, it was not delivered with this equitable component, delivering the external form without the fiscal mechanism that could have sustained it, expanded it and made it more replicable.

Perhaps the most interesting, most productive and most positive evolution of the suburb is Almere, a new town, to the east of Amsterdam, begun in the 1970s but still evolving and expanding. It is a place continually rethinking its possibilities. In the throes of the 2008 banking crisis, for example, it began, the Homeruskwartier, a glorious architectural zoo, developed and built by its own residents. It was built on land reclaimed by the Dutch state from the North Sea.