ancient cities

946 Utopia
living, from formal plans for building new spaces
and societies to more open expressions of desire
for radical change. In addition, despite common
assumptions that utopias are intrinsically impractical
or impossible, utopias are associated with
experiments to construct alternative communities
and settlements in the present. Some commentators
go further and, following the lead of the philosopher
Ernst Bloch in particular, suggest that utopian
impulses may be discerned in a whole range of
everyday activities and practices that embody
desires for a transformed existence and hence that
reach toward different futures.
For all their diversity, utopias have had a long
and close association with urban communities.
Many commentators trace the association back at
least as far as the ancient Greeks, who conceived of
the body politic in terms of the polis or city-state.
Utopian thought since then abounds with images of
new sparkling cities, as attested by such titles as the
City of the Sun, the Garden City, and the Radiant
City. The German saying “city air makes one free,”
derived from a medieval legal principle about the
freedom from serfdom granted to city dwellers, is
similarly suggestive of how cities have often been
viewed in utopian fashion as potential sites of
enlightenment, democracy, and freedom against
countervailing views of them as sites of alienation
and oppression. Cities have been viewed not only
as favored spatial settings for projections of ideal
societies but also as instruments for bringing them
about. They have been the subject of numerous
utopian plans, schemes, and proposals that have
aimed to confront current problems and radically
transform their spaces as well as wider society. The
considerable influence of utopian thought on how
cities have been physically constructed as well as
imagined, conceived, and lived is one reason why
utopias are of critical interest within urban studies.
Yet the importance of the question of utopia for
urban studies extends further, for it invites consideration
of the normative commitments and understandings
of the good society that underpin different
approaches to cities and urbanization in general,
including in cases where these are not explicit.
Histories of Urban Utopias
If utopias have a long association with cities, then
in recent decades that idea seems to have become
frayed and even broken as urban utopias have
been subject to widespread skepticism, disillusionment,
or even outright hostility. As with utopias in
general, urban utopias are frequently dismissed for
being supposedly escapist or irrelevant to current
realities. They are also often rejected on the
grounds of being dangerously authoritarian for
seeking to prescribe solutions to present-day problems
through fixed and dogmatic schemes. The
contrast between this recent situation and that of
earlier periods, especially around the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries when there
occurred a surge in utopian visions and designs for
cities, is striking. Strands of utopianism then
became a major force in confronting problems of
the time associated with poverty, ill health, overcrowding,
poor sanitation, and high mortality
rates. They helped to shape debate about urban
imaginaries, policies, and potential interventions as
cities became a target for critique and a focus for
visions of radical transformation. The dreadfulness
of urban conditions became, for many utopian
thinkers, a spur for action to remake them for the
better. Among the most influential urban utopias
from that time was Ebenezer Howard’s Garden
City, originally proposed in 1898 and promoted
through the movement he established shortly afterward.
Howard was in turn strongly influenced by,
among other sources, the great literary utopias of
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and
William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890).
The early decades of the twentieth century were
marked by an extraordinary array of utopian urban
experiments from within modernist and avant-garde
movements. These were often characterized by an
ambivalent reaction toward existing cities, involving
opposition and even revulsion toward their current
forms, combined with a sense of possibility and
hope that new urban spaces and ways of living were
within reach. Many artists, architects, and planners
took inspiration from new technologies and processes
of industrialization as they plunged into the
maelstrom of modern urban life with the intention
of producing new spaces for a new human subject.
In the process they sought to confront and to find
ways of riding the social, economic, and cultural
changes of the times, notably the upheavals associated
with World War I and the Russian Revolution.
Groups such as the futurists, the expressionists, the
constructivists, the surrealists, and members of the