critical theory part 2: utopia, an island and a city

The dreaded ‘u’ word: Utopia

It is a naïve, hopelessly idealistic vision of a seemingly achievable perfect world.  To come up with a utopian plan for something, be it a small community, a large society, or a physical city, is to be a fool at the very least.  But to attempt to create a utopia is well beyond simple folly, it is to be an oppressor seeking to impose one’s own vision of the common good on all others.

Or maybe utopianism is the only way to look forward in a constructive way.

I am interested in the question of utopian thought and action from both an architectural perspective and from a philosophical perspective.  I understand and agree with many of the critiques of utopianism in architecture and urban design but I also see some real potential in a highly modified form of it.  I also think that those who make buildings and cities have an important challenge to offer to thinkers for whom critique is their final goal.  To explain this I’ll start with a discussion of utopia and design to be followed later by utopia and critical theory. 

I’m less interested in the way utopia was used originally than in it’s current usage, but I should mention its origins.  The word was coined by Thomas More in his 1516 book entitled Utopia: On the best state of a republic and on the new island of Utopia.  The name for the fictional island in the book comes from Greek words that combine to mean ‘no place’, and is likely to have been intended to suggest its homophone, eutopia, which would mean ‘good place’.  The book describes the seemingly ideal social and political order of an island in the Atlantic where everything is done differently than in sixteenth century England.  The only other thing I would like to mention about More’s work here is that I believe this book is a satire.  I know this is not the only interpretation of the book but I fail to see why.  First, More had already been immersed in satire along with his friend Erasmus.  They had translated ancient works of satire and More had participated in the conversations that led to Erasmus’ classic satire In Praise of Folly.  Second, the only reason I can see for determining that More’s work was at all propositional is that it was written a long time ago and therefore is much less enlightened than we are now – an idea I see little evidence to support.

Let’s jump from the sixteenth century to the twentieth.

In architecture and urban design, utopian visions for a ‘new city’ or a ‘new architecture’ were part of the grand visions of modernism.  Many designers came up with alternate ways of making buildings and the ways they relate to one another that were faster, or more open, or freer, or simply newer.  Broad, sweeping manifestos often accompanied drawings of new cities that required a broad sweeping away of existing cities.

Sadly, many of these ideas began to be implemented.  This sweeping away of cities involved the sweeping away of people.  And, as it turned out, much was lost that was of value in existing communities and their buildings. 

The results of these experiments were so clearly disastrous that many challenges arose to the implementation of modern urban projects.  One could argue that the reexamining of architecture and urbanism that began in the 1960s is still going on today.  Design writers such as Robert Venturi (Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture) and Colin Rowe (Collage City, written with Fred Koetter) began proposing heterotopias as an alternate model, valuing multiplicity without unity for buildings and cities.  It took someone outside the echo chamber of design schools, though, to really get to the heart of the problem.  Jane Jacobs’ sprawling The Death and Life of Great American Cities takes a detailed street-eye view of existing urban spaces and details how communities use these spaces to provide safety and maintain social connectedness.  She uses this to point out why high-modernist urban projects are a huge mistake.  Venturi and Rowe attack the surface of the problem, Jacobs gets to the core.

Part of what makes Jacobs’ work compelling is design related.  She demonstrates all that is lost when a designer ignores the collected wisdom of existing urban communities to create entirely new kinds of cities. This is not a challenge to those that propose new ideas, only to those who do this with hubris.  But I would argue that the more important lesson from Jacobs is how much the process of change matters.  It doesn’t matter how wonderful the physical spaces of a city are if they are created in ways that ignore or are forced on actual human communities.  Because of this she proposes a model of incremental growth that is slow, messy, and complicated, kind of like communities.  (The planning strategies of the New Urbanists seem to take into account the design-related aspects of Jacobs’ work while completely ignoring the process-related aspects of it, continuing many of the problems of their modernist forbears.)

So what do these challenges to utopian architecture and urban planning mean for us today?  Stay tuned to find out what I think – and to tell me why I’m wrong.