building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

considered really wise and environmentally friendly choices, no matter how alluring
they may appear.
Robert Owen, a well‐known representative of the so‐called utopian socialism, was
instead the person responsible for the failure of New Harmony. His American
projects were never fully completed, but most of all they did not reap any benefit
from the typical solidarity of members of the religious movements. Several
dissident societies were thus born from his experiment, all of which failed in their
intentions to reform. Although both Owen and his followers persevered for several
decades, they proved to be merely theoreticians. These failures do not diminish the
central role played by Owen's theories as a social reformer and a forerunner of
scientific socialism.
However, the relationship which these settlements had created with the
environment and with nature di not prove to be of any significance, as the
landscape was not a theoretical condition as were the social relationships to be
built.
A destiny similar to Owen's was suffered by the followers of Charles Fourier (1772‐
1837) and Etienne Cabet (1788‐1856), whose ideas penetrated deep into American
society in the first half of the nineteenth century.
In New York at the beginning of the 1840s, Albert Brisbane (1809‐1890), an
American utopian socialist, published a journal called The Phalanx; or Journal of
Social Science, whereas Horace Greeley (1811‐1872), publisher in the same period
of the New York Tribune, was a promoter of various experimental communities
based on Fourier’s ideas. Fourier’s phalanxes found space in settlements featuring
unitary construction devices, the Phalanxes, which opposed the idea of towns based
on individual houses.
This theoretical town planning is also of unquestionable importance and many
authors, such as Lewis Mumford in The Story of Utopias (1922), Francoise Choay in
L’urbanisme: utopies et realites (1965), Leonardo Benevolo in Le origini
dell’Urbanistica Moderna (1963) [The Origins of Modern Town Planning], have
discussed the development and the description of the utopian socialists’ ideas.
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