Housing minister Grant Shapps has invited the Town & Country Planning Association to rediscover its garden city heritage by working with developers on a series of new greenfield sprawl communities.
The Association began life a century ago as the Garden Cities Association and has continued to support the concept of new settlements in the countryside through initiatives like new towns and eco towns.
It recently published a proposal for Reimagining Garden Cities for the 21st Century, backed by developer Land Securities, and now the Government has challenged it to recommence planning for sprawl, initially on surplus public sector land.
"Some of that land will be on sites that could generate new communities of over 5,000 homes," wrote Mr Shapps in a newspaper article.
"And this is just a start - we are encouraging councils to follow Government's lead and make their unused land available for development. If local communities want to use the provisions in the Localism Bill, once it is enacted, they will be able to take control, to plan and to own and manage assets and with visionary investment backing we could see some new garden cities in the near future."
The TCPA responded by promising to examine the "pragmatic lessons of the garden cities" in the context of the Government's planning proposals, so that it could move forward into a new era of building attractive, resilient and sustainable places.
"And where better to start this journey than to rediscover and reimagine the high quality, collaborative and pioneering spirit of the garden cities for the 21st Century, exploring further public-private partnerships and new governance structures that connect people and planning?" said TCPA chief executive Kate Henderson.
The Association promised to bring together different groups with an interest in garden cities.
The move has ominous echoes of New Labour's "eco towns" programme which tried to use surplus public sector land, mostly greenfield, to build low-density new settlements at remote, car-dependent locations.
The result was fierce opposition.
