ancient cities

948 Utopia
This indicates the need to distinguish between
different kinds of urban utopia and utopian
thought. The criticism and condemnation of certain
forms of utopias should not lead to blanket
dismissals of utopianism as such, for urban utopias
are diverse and can serve different functions.
Not confined to the realms of urban planning,
design, and architecture, they are connected to
multiple constituencies, movements, and struggles.
Recent years have indeed seen increasing interest
in recovering different urban utopias and currents
of utopianism that have previously been marginalized
or neglected in mainstream historical accounts.
They include utopias stemming from opposition
to sexism, racism, homophobia, disabilism, and
ecological degradation and from attempts to
imagine and, in some cases, construct alternative
urban spaces and cities. They range from artistic,
architectural, literary, and theoretical projects to
practical planning initiatives and intentional communities.
Some find their roots within mobilizations
that were critical of modernist utopias yet
can be regarded as utopian themselves in their
desire for radical alternatives. Significant in this
regard is the utopianism of twentieth-century
Marxist theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and
avant-gardes such as the situationists. The latter
critiqued modernist orthodoxies and capitalist
urban development during the 1950s and 1960s
while still insisting on the need to revolutionize
urban landscapes and everyday life. Through their
ideas and practices of the constructed situation
and unitary urbanism, they sought to undermine
the pacifying qualities of the society of the spectacle
and to transform spatial and social conditions
in their totality. Constant’s New Babylon
project, for example, developed during the late
1950s and 1960s initially within and subsequently
beyond the Situationist International, was never
meant as a planning scheme but was, rather, an
attempt to challenge existing conceptions of cities
and to provoke new perspectives by giving material
shape to a revolutionary understanding of
urban space, one that was meant ultimately to be
created by the inhabitants themselves through a
process of sociospatial revolution.
Part of the interest in returning to such projects
today is to open up understandings about the
potential critical functions of utopias and utopianism
beyond the commonly assumed “blueprint”
model. This is significant for resisting wholesale
rejections of utopianism and for confronting currently
dominant urban orders constituted through
neoliberal capitalism. Harvey is among a number
of critics who have recently been seeking grounds
for a revived utopianism to provide a means of
countering claims that there is no alternative. In
his own case he calls for a dialectical or spatiotemporal
utopianism that avoids the pitfalls he
associates with utopias of spatial form, on the one
hand, and of utopias of social process, on the
other. This aims to open up radically different
paths for urbanization and urban life from a basis
in the unrealized possibilities of the present. Many
other current writers have found inspiration for
developing utopian perspectives from the actions
and mobilizations of radical social movements.
Among them are those aligned with feminist movements
that have been important for reconceptualizing
utopianism in fluid, dynamic, and oppositional
terms, based not on a fixed goal to be realized but
on an approach toward, a sense of what could be
and is not yet. Also significant are forms of radical
environmentalism as well as global justice movements
whose diverse elements are offering new
perspectives for critical utopias based on the insistence
that another world is possible. At a time of
multiple urban and economic crises, what really
seems utopian today, in the colloquial sense of
impossible or unrealistic, is the continuation of
neoliberal capitalism as it is currently constituted.
The prospects for other kinds of utopias gathering
force thus currently seem strong.
David Pinder
See also Lefebvre, Henri; Marxism and the City; Society
of the Spectacle; Urban Planning
Further Readings
Bingaman, Amy, Lise Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach,
eds. 2002. Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social
Change and the Modern Metropolis. London:
Routledge.
Eaton, Ruth. 2001. Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the
(Un)Built Environment. London: Thames and
Hudson.
Fishman, Robert. 1982. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth
Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and
Le Corbusier. Cambridge: MIT Press.