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Utopian Spaces - By Nikolina Olsen-Rule Futurism’s 100th birthday February 2009 marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first Futurist manifesto by the movement’s founder Filippo Tomassi Marinetti (1876-1944). Futurism was an Italian avant-garde movement that included literature, art and architecture. The movement celebrated human-made motion, the future, and technology. Objects like machines and cars were often used as symbols of the ideology of Futurism. Some of the artists that adopted the Futurist ideology were Giacomo Balla (1871-1958), Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), Carlo Carrà (1881-1966), Gino Severini (1883-1966), and the architect Antonio Sant’Elia (1888-1916) 7 . Brasillia – the realized utopian city Brasilia is the capital of Brazil and has about 3.6 million inhabitants. The city is situated in the central parts of Brazil’s highlands and was planned and developed from 1956. The Brazilian architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer were the main people behind the architectural design. Originally, Brasilia’s road network was planned in a special loop system that made normal traffic lights obsolete. The city is included in UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites 8 . u Imagine a world without poverty or wretchedness, or simply a society where everyone can feel safe and well adjusted, and where there is meaningful work and bright, spacious housing for everyone. This may sound like pure utopia, but is it A closer examination of utopian influences on modern city planning may give new hope to the utopia. Why do we find it hard to embrace the notion of utopia today The answer may be that we require a rational explanation for everything. However, it seems that we are seeing a change in attitudes towards utopia. We do not embrace utopia blindly, but because we modern individuals today are facing new challenges that make us extremely vulnerable. Many things suggest that the societal structures we have so long taken for granted are now being shaken to the core. If you aren’t already worried about the financial crisis, there’s the climate or the war in the Middle East, not to mention poverty. But what is our call to action A so-called Zeitgeist movement has grown from the ashes of the global crisis. But in order to be able to believe that we human beings can change the world, we must understand utopia as an alternative, radically different business model 1 . The etymology of utopia The concept of utopia cannot be boiled down to a single thing. The word utopia has a double meaning, since in Greek it can mean both the good place (eutopia) and the non-existing place (outopia). The opposite of utopia is dystopia – a concept that refers to a hostile place. Finally, there is heterotopia, which means ‘the other place’ 2 . The West’s encounter with utopia goes back all the way to Plato’s The Republic, circa 400BC. Utopia was re-encountered in about 1515, when the writer and Renaissance thinker Sir Thomas More published his novel Utopia. Here, More describes a journey to an imaginary island society that, unlike the Europe of his time, was characterized by egalitarian rule (based on equal distribution of society’s riches, e.g. equal wages). More’s Utopia is a sort of prototype of an ideal society where everybody has equal rights and thrives in a harmonic community. Later, the French sociologist and philosopher Michel Foucault, among others, dealt with the concept of utopia in his essay Of Other Spaces – Heterotopias (1967). Here, he presents the utopia as closely linked to the heterotopia: “Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.” Looking from a present-day perspective, the question is why we have anxiety when it comes to utopia and the idea of an ideal society. Perhaps it is because history has taught us about the big, fallen utopian societies. As the Slovenian philosopher and social critic Slavoj Žižek points out, the fall of the Wall marked the end of the Communist utopia, and the 9/11 attack in New York killed the idea that the world was heading towards a liberal utopia. Finally, the deification of the global market (the forces of free enterprise) was wounded fatally in 2008 3 . However, in order to understand some of the more complex philosophical and socio-critical discourses surrounding utopia, a more concrete approach may be necessary. Here, a society’s physical organization is an obvious thing to watch in order to understand how conceptual ideologies are turned into reality. The perfect city Three utopian schools in particular have influenced city planning in the 20th century. The first of these is the garden city, invented by city planner Ebenezer Howard, who in the same year as he published his book Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898) founded the Garden City movement in Great Britain. The garden city reflects the utopia 38 fo#01 2010 www.iff.dk/FO
Utopian Spaces - By Nikolina Olsen-Rule Seen from the perspective of cultural and social history, the utopian concept has had a rough ride. As was clearly seen in the UN climate summit in December 2009, COP15 in Copenhagen, utopias are very much a matter of power of a city in the midst of nature, designed like a satellite city consisting of a centre encircled by green belts or zones. The clever thing about the garden city is that it is constructed from a modular system wherein small selfsufficient cooperatives and village units are planted like smaller satellites. Each garden city is limited to a certain number of citizens and, if this maximum is exceeded, a new satellite city is founded. This method has been the model for a number of garden cities such as the British Letchworth and Welwyn, and has generally influenced the way suburbs have been developed and expanded in Post-War times. The second school arose from the idea of ‘the city without walls’, introduced by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who is also known for his Japan-inspired, horizontal building style. With his utopian city Broadacre City he intended to build a city where all inhabitants would have a lot of 4000 square metres each. In many ways, the city resembles Howard’s garden city, and the ideals behind it are similar to More’s egalitarian society, Utopia. Broadacre City was meant to be a society without specialists where everyone took turns at being farmers, workers or whatever was needed. Instead of paying with money when trading, the citizens were expected to barter raw materials or services. As the name Broadacre implies, the intent was that all the city’s houses should be built with plenty of distance between them. However, Wright’s visions have instead turned into the densely populated, decentralized suburbs seen in the USA today. A tribute to the metropolis The third school is rooted in the works of the Swiss- French architect and designer Charles-Édouard Jeanneret- Gris. He is better known as Le Corbusier and is perhaps one of modernism’s most original and controversial architects. He launched a range of extremely detailed, diagrammatic and modular architectonic principles, and his systematic and holistic approach characterized everything he worked with – from design to architecture to city planning. In his plans for a large-scale urban project, La Ville Radieuse (or The Radiant City), developed in the 1920’s, he introduced his ideas of a monolithic city of generic and gigantic skyscraper blocks, designed to house three million inhabitants. The idea was to create a more efficient form of housing and at the same time improve the standards of each housing unit. Le Corbusier’s radiant city, which was never realized, was also an implicit criticism of the social structures of society. The radical type of city planning and architecture of which Le Corbusier was an exponent, and by which many other modern city planners have been inspired, is often called tabula rasa architecture. This means that the slate of the ideal city is wiped clean of existing structures, ideals and norms. The new city thus embodies all the hopes and dreams that its planner or architect might have for the future. The prerequisite for realizing Le Corbusier’s hypermodern city was that a large part of central Paris should be levelled to the ground, which meant that the city never came to be. However, Le Corbusier did build a number of building blocks, called unités, where he carried out the principle of building small villages in a housing complex. These can be seen in, for example, Marseilles and Berlin 4 . Le Corbusier has been criticized heavily for his visions of better housing and cities, in particular for his radical approach and the way he divided everything – from a single housing unit to an entire city – into zones. Le Corbusier has been called rigid, bureaucratic, totalitarian, a devotee of concrete – and, yes, a utopian. The tabula rasa cities of modernism Common to the three schools is that they, each in their own way, provide ideas for a society that is viewed as better than the existing one. And even though all three cities have been described as utopian urban projects, they have nonetheless become important signposts for architects and city planners in the 20 th and 21 st centuries. fo#01 2010 www.iff.dk/FO 39
Page 1 and 2: fo012010 the Utopia issue FO/future
Page 3 and 4: A vision is to a business as a ligh
Page 5 and 6: EDITORIAL Utopia Utopia comes from
Page 7 and 8: Designed by Jacque Fresco, www.thev
Page 9 and 10: By Martin Kruse The Difference Betw
Page 11 and 12: The Difference Between Utopias and
Page 15 and 16: By Morten Grønborg The World Accor
Page 17 and 18: The World According to Fresco - By
Page 19 and 20: The World According to Fresco - By
Page 23 and 24: Orwell Was an Optimist - By Klaus
Page 25 and 26: Orwell Was a pessimist - By Klaus
Page 29 and 30: Nudging Utopia By Søren Riis, Evan
Page 31 and 32: Nudging Utopia - By Søren Riis, Ev
Page 33 and 34: Nudging Utopia - By Søren Riis, Ev
Page 35 and 36: Architecture is the will of an epoc
Page 37: Utopian Spaces By Nikolina Olsen-Ru
Page 41 and 42: Utopian Spaces - By Nikolina Olsen-
Page 43 and 44: Faith in the Future in a World of D
Page 45 and 46: Faith in the Future in a World of D
Page 49 and 50: By Marcel Bullinga outside of theme
Page 51 and 52: Nine trends and nine inventions tha
Page 53 and 54: By Johan Peter Paludan outside of t
Page 55 and 56: Future Strategy in the Present - Pa
Page 57 and 58: Future Strategy in the Present - Pa
Page 61 and 62: Visionary thinking - By Morten Paus
Page 67 and 68: AbeliA hsh skAt Designed by Jacque

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