Review of 'The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, Place.' Edited by Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster. University of Georgia Press: Athens. 2012. US$24.95; Hardcover US$69.95; Kindle US$25.85. ISBN: 978-0-8203-3592-6

The central illustration in Ebenezer Howard's innovative urban design plan, 'Garden City', possesses the elegant symmetries of a mandala - a concentric pattern in which circling spheres of human communities are arranged evenly along radial lines as if in harmonised planetary orbit. Created in 1902 as a solution to the congestion and environmental ill-effects of industrialised London, Howard's elegantly abstract diagram also pictures an innovative ideology: the 'Garden City', in both name and image, proposes a futuristic model of urban collectivism based on implicitly natural ('garden') principles, what we might call a mode of yeoman communalism designed to replace, or perhaps more correctly, emplace the offensive congeries (in Howard's view) of inner city London.