The Role of Utopia in Urban Planning

Hatuka and D’Hooghe challenge urban design to confront what changes societies are currently undergoing today, including population growth, rise of dual economics, and transnational migration. So far, urban design today is a product of the Modern Movement’s “reassessment of actual places.” In this reassessment of actual places, public spaces have become arenas for spectacle. Examples include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Parc de la Villette in Paris, and Fremont Street in Las Vegas. All of these examples celebrate the global economy, downplay local political agendas, and lack real engagement with urbanization issues.

The authors suggest that it is necessary to engage in the reformulation of urban ideals and visions of utopia. While utopia may be both a “good place,” as well as a “no place,” the utopian promise is a prerequisite for social change and contributes to the development of society. It is the “concrete utopias grounded in the possible” that challenge people to become more active in the production of a better world. Utopia can be embedded into actual projects that people and societies still inhabit.

Utopic visions indeed can go awry, but it is a better alterative than the postmodernist concentration on championing everyday life and the consumer society. Hatuka and D’Hooghe rhetorically ask, “Can a discourse on the everyday provide more than an anesthetization of urbanity?” “Does a corresponding architecture of the everyday merely legitimate the use of spatial resources without social vision?” They view that it is difficult to keep alive the possibility of socio-political culture without an “alternate” vision of utopia on the horizon.

The utopian methodology of visionary thinking can be particularly useful in the following areas: 1) finding new ways to deal with highly conflicted urban situations; 2) inventing city structures that give formal expression to socio-political ideas; 3) creating new forms of affordable housing that address population growth and ecological crises.

The current Massachusetts Institute of Technology project on Jerusalem is hosting a contest to encourage visionary discourse of the city’s future spatial structure. Recognizing that the superimposition of nationalist projects frequently flan the flames of aggression in ethnically and/or religiously diverse urban communities, could new spatial practices “emancipate” the city from nationalist blueprints could be a solution? “Is it possible to address the fragmentation of modern society and also generate a vision that will include pluralities—across all boundaries—without erasing them?” Can advocacy groups and professionals readdress the relationships between dreams and symbols, spatial form, public institutions, and poverty?

Tali Hatuka and Alexander D’Hooghe, After Postmodernism: Readdressing the Role of Utopia in Urban Design and Planning, 19 Places No. 2 (2007).

Jenny Cheung