This article is part of the series Home Truths: Europe's Housing Challenge.

BRENTWOOD, ENGLAND — Faced with a nationwide housing shortage, the British government is placing its faith in 28 town planners, a few vacant lots and a 19th century planning scheme that’s literally utopian.

At issue is a U.K. housing market even the government admits is utterly broken. Property is often too scarce, too shoddy, too expensive or in the wrong place. Estimates suggest a shortfall of around 4 million homes in England alone.

Enter the garden communities — an effort to rethink British residential land development from the ground up, establish a constellation of economical, walkable, green communities and provide some 25,000 properties in 28 new communities by 2050. The number is envisioned to increase further as the planned developments take root.

Planners say they’re responding not just to the current housing crunch, but to the country’s longer-term needs. “When you’re delivering a brand-new community, it’s not just about recognizing what people want now,” said Philip Drane, planner for Dunton Hills, a “garden village” to be located near the existing town of Brentwood not far from London.

Drane’s brief is to envision a new residential utopia on what is currently some fields and a golf course. “This needs to be flexible and adaptable enough to meet the needs of people well into the future.”

“When you’re delivering a brand-new community, it’s not just about recognizing what people want now” — Philip Drane, planner for a “garden village” near London

The opportunity, and the rare hectares of blank canvas, are exciting and challenging, he said — but not new. The quest for the perfect community has a rich history in Britain.

The English statesman and philosopher Thomas More coined the term “utopia” in 1516. Meaning “good place,” the idea isn’t an abstraction for British planners, who have spent centuries seeking to create a blueprint for it.

The first examples of utopian model villages emerged in the 19th century, when a few philanthropic industrialists and social reformers sought alternatives for workers living in that era’s coal-choked cities. Chocolate maker George Cadbury founded the village of Bournville near Birmingham in 1879. Soap makers the Lever brothers founded Port Sunlight near Liverpool in 1888.

Drane and his 27 counterparts planning new garden communities are drawing heavily on studies of the town of Letchworth, north of London. Dubbed the first “garden city,” it was founded in 1903 by the utopian thinker Ebenezer Howard.

Howard envisaged Letchworth, first described in an 1898 book, as a planned community where the best of town and country combined. Large green areas were interspersed with wide boulevards. The town’s economic model stressed allowing gains from the then-agricultural local economy to remain in the community. Letchworth remains a successful town of more than 30,000 today.

That’s the thinking Drane is being told to revive. “We want to encourage more local areas to come forward with ambitious locally-led proposals for new communities that work as self-sustaining places,” the U.K. government said in a 2016 prospectus calling for projects like Brentwood’s. “They should have high quality and good design hard-wired in from the outset — a new generation of garden villages.”

Blueprint for utopia

Sounds lovely, right? But building 28 utopias, amid a modern real estate market facing shortfalls for millions of people, remains just a plan, yet to face the reality of hiring masons, contracting plumbers and, crucially, swaying local councils.

Planned for up to 4,000 residents, Drane’s Dunton Hills project is set to be constructed in phases, delivering a minimum of 2,700 homes by 2033. The first phase, a series of public meetings with the surrounding communities, began recently.

They included a recent session at the nearby Brentwood library. Library employee Barry O’Brien said the garden village scheme received a cautious welcome at the session.

“People understand we need more houses here, and they seemed happier that it would be in a separate undeveloped area away from the town, so it doesn’t pressure the infrastructure here so much,” he said.

Still, local critics have emerged, often raising concerns strikingly similar to those raised against classic suburban development.

The Dunton Hills site is on what is known as London’s green belt, an area where building has been restricted in order to stop urban sprawl. Critics worry garden village plans will allow development on previously preserved open space, eroding the green belt.

A group of residents of the village of Marden in Kent have formed a protest group to challenge the building of 2,000 homes in a garden community close to them. “It seems to be a way for developers to get approval via the backdoor for high-density housing on sites where they would not normally receive approval,” the group said in a statement on its website.

Traffic and infrastructure is also a concern.

While locating the garden village away from Brentwood is popular with residents there, that moves it closer to two other neighboring communities, Thurrock and Basildon. Councillors there have already voiced worries that their towns’ infrastructure might come under pressure as Dunton Hills develops.

Environmental groups believe higher density accommodation would have less of an impact on the landscape than the lower-density housing typical of garden community schemes. The concept has also been accused of lacking ambition and trafficking in nostalgia for village life.

“Howard’s real genius was not the garden city idea — it was his ability to find a new answer to a seemingly intractable set of problems,” wrote Frances Holliss, an academic at the school of architecture at London Metropolitan University, after the garden community idea resurfaced. “We should be following his method, not adopting his out-of-date idea.”

No Two Towns the Same

Though many garden community master plans remain at a very early stage, some shared ideas are emerging.

The communities are envisioned for a more flexible workforce, with broadband and accessible working spaces. Commercial activity will be included to allow residents to work closer to home, and transit will be designed to encourage the use of public transport, as well as cycling and walking, rather than private cars.

Multi-use buildings with occasional tenants, such as a doctor’s surgery open a couple of days a week, are also being studied, with the goal of making the communities independent and reducing the likelihood that the garden villages will evolve into typical dormitory settlements.

Planners also aim to preserve any historical or geographical features. At Dunton Hills, a historic farmhouse is expected to be maintained as part of the design, which will also seek to exploit the unique topography of the site, local council head Chris Hossack said. “It has a nice vantage point with natural lakes and hill space that we are looking to retain,” he said.

Though the 28 projects will share a planning philosophy and some infrastructure ideas, local planners have been given significant leeway to address local concerns. Garry Legg, who is working on St. Cuthberts, a planned garden community near the northern English city of Carlisle, said water management would likely be a key part of that village’s design.

The English statesman and philosopher Thomas More coined the term “utopia” in 1516. Meaning “good place,” the idea isn’t an abstraction for British planners, who have spent centuries seeking to create a blueprint for it.

Carlisle city center suffered significant damage in devastating 2015 floods — the council offices are still not fully repaired. Located upstream, St. Cuthberts’ design may incorporate a run-off area for the river that will also function as new wildlife habitat.

Housing styles are still under discussion at both Dunton Hills and St Cuthberts but a key element for both planning teams was variety, they said. As inspiration, they cited an area of new development called Graven Hill in the town of Bicester in England, where the planning process has been rewritten to make it easier for plot owners to build homes according to their own designs.

“To be honest, if I saw any one of those designs on its own, I might have concerns, but when you look at them all together it just works,” Legg said.

Whether “garden cities” prove to be Howard’s paradise, or just suburbs wrapped in Brexit-era nostalgia, won’t be clear for a while.

Because of the long lead times of the garden villages, planners have spent time visiting schools to get the input from the children who might eventually live in them. “Realistically, by the time these projects are delivered, they are going to be for people who are in primary schools now,” Drane said.