Marxist geographer David Harvey describes the history of urban policy as "fraught with utopian dreams."

From Robert Owen's New Lanark and model industrial villages like Port Sunlight and Bournville, to Georges Eugene Haussmann's Paris, Ildefons Cerda's Barcelona and Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, there's a long history of attempts to build the ideal place.

In Britain the most ambitious effort to rethink and redesign urban settlement was the post-war "new towns" programme.

State-led planning and finance created 21 new communities and homes for two million people.

Thatcherism rejected democratic planning in favour of "free market" - though heavily state-subsidised - deregulation that allowed private developers to run amok.

Government-sponsored place-making strategies returned to the political agenda under new Labour and its ill-fated "eco-towns" initiative and are back again as Establishment politicians scramble to address the housing crisis.

Current debates centre around a revival of the garden cities concept given expression by Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) at the turn of the 20th century.

Howard was a remarkable man, a self-taught visionary inspired by a variety of radical thought that embraced utopian socialism, anarchism and spiritualism.

From his humble birthplace in Fore Street in the City of London - ironically, now the site of the Barbican Centre and other developments that are the antithesis of garden cities - Howard became the most influential urban planner of his time.

Responding to the congestion and poverty of late-Victorian cities, he proposed starting again by building a network of economically self-sufficient new settlements separated from the industrial city by a "green belt."

Garden cities were designed to encourage civic pride and social solidarity by synthesising the benefits of town and country, a manifesto supported by emerging forces of municipal reform.

A prudential trust finance model was used to buy and develop land at Letchworth, Hertfordshire, where a variety of well-maintained, cottage-style homes stand amid landscaped gardens and public parks.

In his lifetime, Howard managed to partially repeat Letchworth at nearby Welling Garden City.

Thereafter his ambition to transform urban living relied on isolated imitations, of which there are many around the world.

However, two decades after Howard's death, garden cities provided the inspiration for post-war new towns.

The programme's first wave saw the designation of 10 sites, most of them around London where the joint pressures of bomb damage and slum clearance led the Labour government to seek radical solutions.

The relationship between Stevenage, Harlow or Bracknell and Howard's bucolic ideal may not be immediately apparent, but they share the model of active, integrated planning to build homes, workplaces, transport and leisure facilities that attempt to meet the needs of a whole community, rather than being defined by market-driven individualism.

Sadly, new towns have been included in a wider assault on state planning, the alleged failure of "modernism" and facile disapproval of architectural style.

These criticisms are often veiled attacks on the principle of municipalism in general and council housing in particular.

The denigration of public planning fed laissez-faire Thatcherite urbanism, most notably in London's Docklands, but also skewing the founding principles of the new towns.

At Milton Keynes, the boldest expression of the type, a balance between public and private-sector housing was clearly stipulated in the original plans.

But the '80s brought the right to buy and an outcrop of speculative building in the form of identikit suburban semis. Milton Keynes now resembles parts of Los Angeles.

The spectre of "over-development" haunts the debate about how we meet our housing needs, but it is the commodification of housing that distorts policy decisions, not an objective assessment of how and where we build. The illogicality of the market, allied to vested political interests, put paid to new Labour's 2007 aim of building 10 "carbon neutral" eco-towns.

But there is also a mistaken attitude to planning that threatens any future initiative of its kind.

The recent floods have refocused attention on the intrinsic link between environmentalism and housing, but with little mainstream recognition that our shared interest in the ecology is irreconcilable with planning in the interests of private property.

And there is another insidious aspect to revisiting garden cities. One of the blighted legacies of new towns is their image as "overspill" areas for displaced, isolated working-class communities.

In the context of rising housing costs, under-supply of genuinely affordable homes and benefit cuts, there is a real danger that ex-urban new developments become dumping grounds for the poor, while only the wealthy can afford to live in and enjoy the city.

To avoid old mistakes, a future Labour government must rediscover planning in the public interest.

As with the new towns, some people may welcome an opportunity to move out of the city, but this must be a free choice, not a coerced one.

An essential feature of garden cities and new towns was also the provision of local jobs and public services so they didn't become economically and socially sterile dormitories.

Labour needs to reverse the "London sucks" phenomenon and plan for the country as a whole.

Howard's solution was a network of "social cities," based on peace, justice and liberty where "a vast army of workers utilise their power, the waste of which is the source of our poverty, disease and suffering."

Above all, what Howard knew is that society can control its housing, instead of being controlled by it.

Next week's article will focus on private renting