This introduction presents and discusses the historical focus of the book: the significance of “physical culture”—active body practices that are linked to and shaped by the workings of power within social contexts—in the history of the British and American garden city movements in the early twentieth century. The introduction elucidates the historical and theoretical arguments that subsequently frame and steer the book’s revisiting of garden city planning history. It lays out the case for re-examining historical contexts of garden city planning through the lens of Foucauldian biopolitics, constituting one way of studying how garden city plans were often imagined, discussed, and carried out as spatialized strategies for the production of particular forms of active or otherwise healthy bodies. As part of this discussion, the introduction explains the relationship between physical culture and the biopolitics of the garden city diagram, with forms of physical culture serving as context-specific instruments for the production, promotion, and self-regulation of healthy living.