Abstract
Utopian cities from social reform literature from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries were a serious attempt to improve living and working conditions of their time. Some of this literature included a design for a city that would be complimentary to and enhance the political philosophy of the respective authors. Four of the most famous works which include a plan of a city are, Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis (City of the Sun) (1602), Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619), Robert Owen’s Villages of Co-operation (1817 & 1830) and James Silk Buckingham’s Victoria (1849). These works are frequently featured in literature on utopian cities. However, no consideration is given to whether these ‘utopian’ cities have any value as urban plans or whether they incorporate any desirable urban features. These urban designs of the city are significant to political philosophies because the cities are presented as being integral to such philosophies. This paper considers the following questions: ‘Do the main principles behind the initial political philosophies and their coinciding plan endure within the design of these cities?’ ‘Does a modern audience perceive in these cities the features that made them utopian in the centuries in which they were planned?’
Highlights
The idea of the perfect city has a long history
Integrated systems with the minimum integration at the entrance and the maximum integration in the centre of the city. This is not a surprising result given the symmetry of cities that lead to the centre and lack any dead ends, it does confirm the permeability of such an urban plan. These four cities are all called ‘utopian.’ In many senses this is used as a derogatory term, because it implies that they are unrealistic, unliveable and have no value in urban design – that their designs were meant for the enhancement of the literature only
As we have reported in greater detail in an article in Journal of General Psychology (Rubin; Morrison 2014), the overall analysis of the survey showed that people who reported a strong sense of self-responsibility rated the cities as more liveable because they perceived them to be richer and better resourced
Summary
The idea of the perfect city has a long history. The earliest surviving description of an ideal city was in Plato’s Republic where Plato described a polis to be an imitation – a city that was ruled by philosopherkings (see Plato 1955). The New Jerusalem was the Utopia that was beyond reach of human endeavour and was a city of escape where all good men could enter and were not barred by their earthly status and class in society. It was not until the sixteenth century that a more earthly ideal state was considered in literature. The details of the architecture and layout were not described, the emphasis was on the sameness of the architecture, which reflects the qualities of the Utopian’s society Within this closed society, the citizens of Utopia escaped the harsh realities of sixteenth century politics, war, and disease. The political philosophy and the design of the city became interlinked, in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and the design of the city was intended to enhance the political philosophies for which underpinned them
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