Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (un)built Environment: Utopianism and the (Un)built Environment

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Ideal Cities Utopianism and the (un)built environment

Ruth Eaton, Thames & Hudson, 2002

Utopia, an exhibition on utopian thought was shown at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2000 and then travelled to New York. Ideal Cities is not the catalogue of that exhibition but seems to be closely related to it as many of the exhibits are reproduced in the beautifully illustrated book, which would make a very attractive Christmas present. The text aims to be a chronological history of the search for the ideal city form, but becomes by necessity, a more general history of ideas about city form, in the style of the Kostof books from the same publishers. Indeed the author occasionally strays from the subject to encompass wider themes.

The ideal city model, often drawn, described and discussed but never built, always implies a criticism of the status quo - mostly considered to be chaotic or simply unsatisfactory. It is also an attempt to bring order and to tame nature. As a result, the ideal city form is almost always based on rigid geometry, with either the circle reflecting the universe or the grid in a square, the preferred design.

The history starts in Babylon, continues in classic antiquity and in the Middle Ages, makes a detour through the Middle East and China, and really explodes in the Renaissance. Until then, the search for an ideal city is closely related to a religious or cosmological view of the word, a longing for a Paradise lost or a New Jerusalem. In the 15th Century the role of the architect evolves into an increasingly intellectual one and the city becomes an objective space worthy of analysis. The search for an ideal order permeates the arts, and urban design is part of this search, but it is also influenced by technological change, not least in warfare. Thus one of the few ideal models built in 1593, Palma Nova, "fulfilled most successfully… typically utopian criteria: protection from the outside world and a certain hermetism regarding time and space" (p.60). By then Thomas More's Utopia had been published, offering an ideal society model rather than a specific design. Nevertheless Moore describes the physical characteristics of his ideal towns.

Eaton's history continues by travelling to the New World where the colonial masters "civilised" the natives and controlled nature through urban development. With the Enlightment, the search for utopia changed from backward looking to faith in progress and the future, but the advent of the Industrial Revolution divided the utopians in two camps; those believing that technological change would result in the ideal society, and those who wanted to return to a pre-industrial paradise, a split that continued into the 20th Century. A substantial chapter is devoted to the last hundred years during which utopian ideas led to authoritarian regimes and inhumane environments, even in cases where the motives were decent: "instead of the inconvenience of filth and confusion, we have now got the boredom of hygiene… Just miles upon mile of organized nowhere, and nobody feeling he is "somebody living somewhere" (A. van Eyck quoted p.218 ). The link between the ideal city and the control of society is made throughout the book and is nowhere clearer than in this last period.

Readers will not find much that is new in this text; its interest lies in the grouping of themes, the links between various currents of ideas, and the wonderful illustrations.

(This review was first published in Urban Design Quarterly 85, Winter 2003 and is reproduced with the Editor's kind permission)