Since Thomas More, five hundred years ago, by linking together the idea of "no-place-land" (ou-topos) and "good place" (eu-topos), imagined a complex, self-contained world, set on an island, as a critical response to the society of that time, Utopia has played a fundamental role in the construction of modern architecture and urban planning. As disciplines that are able to materialize utopian forms by turning Utopia into a project, they ended to incorporate the transformative potential towards an alternative ideal and better future. On such a framework, two different forms of Utopia can be distinguished: on the one hand, we find a strong focus on community; on the other, what Tafuri (1973) calls «the utopia implicit in the realized fact, in the concreteness of "things" constructed and verifiable». The first one consists of anti-urban utopias, which have their historical continuity reaching back at least to the era of the Enlightenment, then strictly connected with eighteenth century anarchic theories of the necessity of a "dissolution of cities", embracing the Garden City model, Soviet decentralization as well as both the Regional Planning Association's regionalism and Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, all referring to the model of the workmen's settlement, based on a strong nostalgia for Tönnies Gemeinshaft, the "organic community", away from the anguish of metropolitan alienation. The second, on the contrary, does not deny the metropolis as such, but it can rather be described as an attempt to preserve a principle of form for it and within the dynamics of urban structures. Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse, Tony Garnier's Cité Industrielle as well as both Futurist images of the city and R.B. Fuller's technological utopian projects are examples of such typology. But the twentieth century has clearly shown how Utopia can easily turn into its antonym Dystopia (no-good place): examples in this sense are given by large mass-produced prefabricated housing complexes, which, especially in countries of the former socialist block, were imagined as the basis for the construction of a new society. Furthermore, our contemporary cities and metropolitan areas seem to highlight that Utopia implies the existence of the parallel "other" space of Heterotopias (Foucault, 1984), which expresses both reality and unreality of utopian projects, by making them possible. At the same time, technological advancement suggests new spaces for utopian projects, as in the case of the "smart city" as well as the crisis of top-down planning models, founded on the certainty of the so-called "expert knowledge", implies the idea (and the rhetoric) of a constantly-in-progress participative project.   The utopian dimension of the project has long been one of EdA's interdisciplinary research focus. The journal, in fact, has devoted a specific thematic network to the issue in order to gather a wide range of utopian projects, without any spatial or temporal limit. The aim of this call for paper, instead, consists of focusing only on utopian projects of the twentieth century as well as on contemporary spatial utopias. On the one hand, paper are expected to illustrate what can we still learn from utopian projects of the «short Twentieth century» (Hobsbawm, 1995); on the other, papers focusing on contemporary utopian (or dystopian) spaces are welcome. More generally, what is interesting here is answering the following questions: is there still a space for Utopia? Can we still consider Utopia as an "engine" for real architectural and planning project? Or should it be thought as nothing but an unattainable dream that can eventually be used in order to hide undesirable social transformations? In which way realized utopian projects of the Twentieth century can be re-thought and re-used in our contemporary cities and territories?

Utopia: real architectural and planning projects

LAMBERTI, CLAUDIA
2017-01-01

Abstract

Since Thomas More, five hundred years ago, by linking together the idea of "no-place-land" (ou-topos) and "good place" (eu-topos), imagined a complex, self-contained world, set on an island, as a critical response to the society of that time, Utopia has played a fundamental role in the construction of modern architecture and urban planning. As disciplines that are able to materialize utopian forms by turning Utopia into a project, they ended to incorporate the transformative potential towards an alternative ideal and better future. On such a framework, two different forms of Utopia can be distinguished: on the one hand, we find a strong focus on community; on the other, what Tafuri (1973) calls «the utopia implicit in the realized fact, in the concreteness of "things" constructed and verifiable». The first one consists of anti-urban utopias, which have their historical continuity reaching back at least to the era of the Enlightenment, then strictly connected with eighteenth century anarchic theories of the necessity of a "dissolution of cities", embracing the Garden City model, Soviet decentralization as well as both the Regional Planning Association's regionalism and Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, all referring to the model of the workmen's settlement, based on a strong nostalgia for Tönnies Gemeinshaft, the "organic community", away from the anguish of metropolitan alienation. The second, on the contrary, does not deny the metropolis as such, but it can rather be described as an attempt to preserve a principle of form for it and within the dynamics of urban structures. Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse, Tony Garnier's Cité Industrielle as well as both Futurist images of the city and R.B. Fuller's technological utopian projects are examples of such typology. But the twentieth century has clearly shown how Utopia can easily turn into its antonym Dystopia (no-good place): examples in this sense are given by large mass-produced prefabricated housing complexes, which, especially in countries of the former socialist block, were imagined as the basis for the construction of a new society. Furthermore, our contemporary cities and metropolitan areas seem to highlight that Utopia implies the existence of the parallel "other" space of Heterotopias (Foucault, 1984), which expresses both reality and unreality of utopian projects, by making them possible. At the same time, technological advancement suggests new spaces for utopian projects, as in the case of the "smart city" as well as the crisis of top-down planning models, founded on the certainty of the so-called "expert knowledge", implies the idea (and the rhetoric) of a constantly-in-progress participative project.   The utopian dimension of the project has long been one of EdA's interdisciplinary research focus. The journal, in fact, has devoted a specific thematic network to the issue in order to gather a wide range of utopian projects, without any spatial or temporal limit. The aim of this call for paper, instead, consists of focusing only on utopian projects of the twentieth century as well as on contemporary spatial utopias. On the one hand, paper are expected to illustrate what can we still learn from utopian projects of the «short Twentieth century» (Hobsbawm, 1995); on the other, papers focusing on contemporary utopian (or dystopian) spaces are welcome. More generally, what is interesting here is answering the following questions: is there still a space for Utopia? Can we still consider Utopia as an "engine" for real architectural and planning project? Or should it be thought as nothing but an unattainable dream that can eventually be used in order to hide undesirable social transformations? In which way realized utopian projects of the Twentieth century can be re-thought and re-used in our contemporary cities and territories?
2017
978-88-548-9919-3
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11568/873664
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