Kaunas – a Baltic Garden City?

Abstract

From 1919 to 1939, when Kaunas assumed the status of the provisional capital of Lithuania, the architectural character of its urban environment was forged by the processes that were characteristic of that period – modernization and progress. In the 1920s housing was in severely short supply in the rapidly growing capital, so residential buildings were a significant part of construction activity and of the city’s modernization programme throughout the interwar period. Among the documents influencing the concept of living environment was a new master plan for Kaunas developed in 1923 by Danish engineer and urban planner Marius Frandsen and Lithuanian architect Antanas Jokimas. The project pro- posed dividing the city into different functional zones. One of these areas, residential Žaliakalnis, testifies to the fact that the experimental thoughts of Ebenezer Howard’s garden city were among the most important urban inspirations behind it. Through the lens of the historical sources, the article examines how Lithuanians attempted to adopt this idea. Comparing the theoretical aspirations and the practical applications of the garden city experiment, the article argues that Kaunas is among the cities where the universal concept of green suburbs found fertile ground.