Utopian City Research Articles

La ciudad ideal de Jacques Demy. Reflejos de Nantes en otras ciudades portuarias

Dentro de la Nouvelle Vague, Jacques Demy es una figura singular e innovadora. Su filmografía está profundamente ligada a Nantes. Un amor por esta ciudad que se observa en cada uno de sus trabajos. Aunque solamente filmó en dos ocasiones esta ciudad sus ecos han traspasado a las demás ciudades en las que se inscribe el resto de su obra. Gracias a su personalísima visión de un universo “en-chante” nos presenta su ciudad ideal, siempre a partir de su deseo de descubrir un cosmos repleto de color y música homenajeando a los grandes musicales de Hollywood. La ciudad como un lugar de ensueño repleto de colores; un elemento indispensable y característico de la filmografía del autor que se convierte en un personaje más.

Utopias in the Islamic Middle Ages: Ibn Ṭufayl and Ibn al-Nafīs

ABSTRACT This essay examines the utopian features in two related works from the Islamic Middle Ages. Both use the theme of an isolated thinker living alone on a desert island and try to convey different theoretical conclusions about man, society, and the use of reason through this narrative device. Utopian themes common to both books are shown to include the utopian city, utopian education, and utopian transcendence; however, in the end Ibn Ṭufayl tends to dismiss society entirely, while Ibn al-Nafīs endorses social reality as it is.

Émile Zola's Volatile Utopia

The essay explores the role played by anarchist thinking on Zola's utopian city in Travail (1901). While Zola did not consider anarchism to be a viable political ideology for the ideal city portrayed in the novel, he found it to be a revelatory model for its artistic culture. Drawing from anarchist agitator Peter Kropotkin, Zola conceived of the residential area as the antithesis of the city center. This essay will examine the contradictory facets in this piece of early twentieth-century utopian fiction, and, through this lens, will consider the more salient tensions in modernist utopias as a whole.

Peter the Great's U topia: S t. P etersburg as an A sian City

Peter the Great's Utopia: St. Petersburg as an Asian City Yelena Mazour‐Matusevich Town so gorgeous, town of beggars, Air of slavery, splendid face, Pale green archway of your heaven, Boredom, cold, and granite grace. (A. Pushkin) What will be presented here is a hypothesis, which emerged in the process of writing an article about Thomas More's most famous book, Utopia. Utopian thought and architectural planning have a fundamental connection: both strive to form social space according to certain ideal. In More's Utopia, this ideal has a direct model: Plato's Republic. Multiple parallels between More's Utopia and Plato's Republic have been well documented and are easily verifiable. This essay will argue that the conception of the city of St. Petersburg might be to a certain extent related to both of the above‐mentioned utopian texts. To the best of my knowledge, St. Petersburg's connection to the European utopian tradition has not yet been the subject of academic research. This is not to say that the city's utopian nature has not been commented upon before. On the contrary, observations concerning the city's unnatural, deceitful, and faux air have long become commonplace in Russian literature and especially in the early 20th century poetry. The Russian researchers N. Bystrov and I. Polyakova recently wrote an article with the explicit title “St. Petersburg as Utopia,” wherein they stress the strange бeзвpeмeньe (extemporal aspect) of the city, its lack of connection to both time and space, which are due to the city's utopian origin. This origin itself, however, has remained unclear. It is evident that from the beginning, Peter strove to re‐create his capital after a certain model in which Lindsey Hughes, albeit dimly, perceives, for example, the idea of a “pleasant place” (locus amoenus) associated with Ovid's metamorphoses. However, considering Peter's education, on which more will be said further on, the tsar's familiarity with Ovid seems rather unlikely. Also, Peter's emphasis on the military, administrative, and bureaucratic aspects of St. Petersburg project does not fit the Ovidian pattern. St. Petersburg does not correspond to the native Russian utopian model either. For, according to the legend, the utopian city of Kitezh was situated on the lake in the splendid wooden area in central Russia, and disappeared in the depths of the lake upon contact with the hordes of Asian invaders. Neither St. Petersburg's political purpose nor its geography of a swampy wasteland matches this description. In this essay, my aim is to make a case of the city's connection to Plato's utopian construct. I believe that, although indirect and hidden, this connection concerns the major component of Plato's Republic: the idea of utopia as a state machine. This element of Plato's work has been initially explored in Louis Mumford's brilliant 1966 article “Utopia, the City and the Machine.” Mumford convincingly argues that Plato's social model is oriented not toward the future but toward the past and is inspired not by the Greek but by the ancient Asian, Egyptian, or Mesopotamian societal organization. According to Mumford, Plato's choice of inspiration was conditioned by his bitterness over Athens’ military defeats in the Peloponnesian War, which was due, in large part, to the internal instability of Greek cities: “[…] the constitution and daily discipline of Plato's ideal commonwealth converge to a single end: fitness for making war.” It is with Plato that the classic elements of the ancient Asian despotic city‐state enter into the conception of urban utopia: it is isolated, rigidly stratified, planned according to cosmic patterns, closely controlled, highly regulated, and driven by the absolute power of the king. By means of putting together Mumford's arguments and examining, one by one, the similarities between Plato's Republic and the archaic Asian city, the parallel with St. Petersburg will appear not so far‐fetched. The ancient Asian city is, first of all, “the creation of a king acting in the name of a god, a sacred place.” Second, the king's first act, at the foundation of the city, is the erection of a temple within a heavily walled...

Engineering a Global City

This research concerns the Malaysian Multimedia Super Corridor project. Part of the project is a construction of a future intelligent city named Cyberjaya. This is a utopian city. The dream encompasses constructing working and living spaces for information communication technology professionals and experts from all over the world. Based on an ethnographic approach, this article seeks to explore what happens when utopian ideas are implemented. That is, rather than testing whether or not the dream has become true, the authors investigate the “materiality” of dreamwork in the development of a “planned city.” They show that the utopian globalized information communication technology city is built on the principles of zoning, sterility, and security. These principles are at the core of engineering a global community of knowledge workers. The authors argue that the ordering of this particular version of utopia—discursively anchored in a specific hybridization of (hyper)modernity, Malaysian culture, and Islam—has resulted in a proliferation of “non-places” that inhibit binding associations and thus prevent the development of a sense of “belonging.”

‘Cleaning the City’: Plato and Popper on Political Change

This paper examines an issue that seems particularly overlooked in the debate on Plato and Popper, namely that of political change. The aim of the paper is to challenge the largely unchallenged assumption that modern liberal democracy can play the role of the general standard, upon which basis we can judge the thinkers of the past. Indeed, in the Open Society liberal democracy sets the boundaries of what is considered as a ‘rational’ political change, thus revealing that Popper holds a form of teleological conception of historical development. The paper argues for a different interpretation of Plato’s approach to the question of political change, against Popper’s claim that the final aim of the utopian city of the Republic is the elimination of change. The conclusion is that Plato’s utopian construction provides us with better tools than Popper’s framework for thinking of change in politics.

Plato on the Omo: reflections on decision-making among the Kara of southern Ethiopia

The paper presents an ethnographic description of the institutions and processes of decision-making among the Kara of Southern Ethiopia, central among them the council of spokesmen called the borkotto bitti. Comparing these practices as well as the Kara's own discussions of them with equivalent practices of their cultural neighbours, the Hamar, reveals the extent and complexity of social imagination in the Lower Omo Valley. The philosopher Plato's treatise on the philosopher-kings of the utopian city (“Republic”) offers another foil for the ethnographic data in its dense discussion of the links between decision-making, personal virtue, status, accountability and the common weal, which mirrors the Kara's own reflections. The inevitable contradictions in the political system are accordingly treated not simply from an analytical perspective, but as an actors' problem.

Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the Making of the Modern World

This is, in many ways, quite a disappointing book. It seems intended to accompany—or to have grown out of—a North American university course on the contribution of apocalyptic culture to Western Civilisation. Nonetheless, Apocalypse Then falls between two stools: often too sophisticated for its target audience of undergraduates and general readers, yet at times too superficial to convince consistently the expert. Consequently it is neither textbook nor specialist work. Trying too hard on occasions to please students—‘no graduate students need apply’ (p. 109), ‘no sacred Cliff Notes’ (p. 20), ‘turn up at seminars, drop in at academic cocktail parties’ (p. 181), ‘music, dancing, and, oh yes seminars and lectures’ (p. 244)—Williamson has several deft one-liners that are almost counterbalanced in equal measure by some jarring turns of phrase. Thus, on the one hand, he writes that Jesus ‘clearly did not anticipate a new faith, much less a church’ (p. 9); that Protestantism was ‘so resolutely text-based, so emphatically a religion of the Word’ (p. 57); that ‘a world without the apocalypse remained a world without a master narrative’ (p. 230): but, on the other hand, Charles Stuart's trial and execution ‘resulted from his bottomless, truly Nixonian duplicity’ (p. 161), allegations of Quaker female public nudity are reduced to ‘chicks up front!’ (p. 188), the Quaker leader James Nayler's female followers are ‘groupies’ (p. 189), while even the élite priest-scientists of Tommaso Campanella's utopian City of the Sun like to ‘have a good shag’ on rare occasions (p. 117).

U.S. Women Writing Race

U.S. Women Writing Race Katherine Adams By focusing on the production of racial meanings by women, this special issue of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature takes an uncommon approach to a common pairing of terms. It asks: what do we learn about the category of race when women write it? What do we learn about the category women? For excellent reasons, Americanist literary criticism tends to be more interested in the unwriting of race. Sensitive to the extraordinary violence performed by racial discourses—including, many argue, those generated on behalf of identity politics—we value writing that denaturalizes racial concepts and disrupts their effects. This emphasis on writing against race is, perhaps, especially pronounced in scholarship on women writers—work that is often informed by a feminist concern with resistance to oppressive paradigms, or, more troubling, by a persisting critical habit (one identified by Lora Romero two decades ago) of imagining women writers as removed from power and from white masculinist hegemony, innocent, unimplicated, and critically objective.1 A similar and potentially related tendency is evident in feminist scholarship on intersectionality. Sociologist Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectional" in 1989 in the context of her ground-breaking research on how race and gender interact in employment discrimination and violence against women.2 Twenty years later, a large portion of the work that calls itself intersectional analysis (much of which also comes out of the social sciences) still characterizes race—along with gender, class, and other such categories—solely in terms of structural oppression. In a recent collection on intersectionality, one essay defines race and gender as "axes of domination," another as "social divisions," and a third as simply "inequalities."3 This is not to discount the important scholarship that approaches intersectionality through ontology and epistemology—here the influential founding example is Patricia Hill Collins's Black Feminist Thought (1990).4 But while standpoint theorists and critical race scholars have thoroughly examined how race combines with gender and other forms of social identity to structure practices of knowledge and agency, they have not often concerned themselves with how intersectional subjects carry out their own racial projects.5 In feminist studies of intersectionality, race and gender are still largely framed as things that happen to us. The essays collected here demonstrate the benefits—for both literary [End Page 237] criticism and research on intersectionality—of asking how women make racial meaning. Four offer critical analyses of fiction and poetry by U.S. women writers; one looks back on a career of writing and reading African American's children books; and the concluding piece, a new entry to TSWL's archive section, moves outside of U.S. contexts to examine women's testimony for South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. All six arguments show that when an analysis takes women's production as its beginning point, there is little danger of reducing race or gender to injurious forces that act upon unified Cartesian subjects from without.6 Here race is never merely a false construct that writers strive to discredit, but an ineluctable medium of self-becoming made up of cultural practices, social interactions, and the everyday inhabitance of embodiment. One outcome of this perspective is a more fully realized investigation of woman writers as intersectional subjects: both producers and products of racial meaning, not legible through an opposition of compliance versus subversion. Another is a more situated, less totalizing understanding of race—one that, for example, underscores its diverse uses and effects. To be sure, all of the essays are concerned with understanding how concepts of race oppress and exclude, but they also show us race functioning as a mode of pleasure, play, and emotional intimacy. We find race used to reify difference and naturalize hierarchy; but we also discover how its introduction can destabilize fixed orders and established narratives. These essays also bring into relief the diverse vocabularies and locations within which race take place. They indicate race as enunciated through the languages of nationalism, eugenics, consumerism, cartography, translation, jazz composition, lyric poetry, and early modern drama, and as it emerges from the geographies of the body, the hair salon, the front yard, the utopian city, the...

The Death and Life of a Chicago Edifice: Gwendolyn Brooks's "In the Mecca"

Isolation, stratification, fixation, regimentation, standardization, militarization--one or more of these attributes enter into the conception of the utopian city, as expounded by the Greeks. And these same features remain, in open or disguised form, even in the supposedly more democratic utopias of the nineteenth century, such as Bellamy's Looking Backward. In the end, utopia merges into the dystopia of the twentieth century; and one suddenly realizes that the distance between the positive ideal and the negative one was never so great as the advocates or admirers of utopia had professed. --Lewis Mumford, Utopia, the City and the Machine Sit where the light corrupts your face. Mies Van der Rohe retires from grace. And the fair fables fall.--Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca As Lewis Mumford explains, utopias of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries merge into the dystopia of the twentieth century because utopias rely on a specific way of ordering space, usually maintaining the established order by subtle and less subtle strategies of compulsion. In other words, to achieve an ideal society, utopias promote the sense that people are a chaotic mass that needs to be ordered through the control of space. In the twentieth century, the negative idealism of planning present in ancient utopias resurfaces as a response to the sense that the modern city is a dystopia that can only be redeemed by violent reshaping. One of the most extreme cases of reforming undesirable, unbeautiful, and poverty-stricken segments of space involves planners' response to the urban of American cities. In response to this decline, mid-twentieth-century planners proposed the urban renewal that erased entire neighborhoods and further deepened segregation, poverty, and racism. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, in their landmark study on segregation, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, explain the growing racist response to inner cities in the twentieth century by illuminating the facts of authors unambiguously indict white public institutions for the construction of racially segregated areas within cities: The evolution of segregated, all-black neighborhoods.., was not the result of impersonal market forces .... On the contrary, [they were] constructed through a series of well-defined institutional practices, private behaviors, and public policies by which whites sought to contain growing black populations (Massey and Denton 10). In the 1950s in particular, housing reached its peak deepening the decline of inner city neighborhoods. (1) As the above quotation shows, planners and ideologues reinforced the ancient idea of regimentation and stratification that Mumford mentions, but also translated it into a modern version of idealism called residential segregation to achieve and protect upper- and middle-class white utopias. discourses with which the planners, designers, architects, and ideologues justified these racially exclusive modern utopias, however, did not always contain the word segregation. These particular positions in discourse used terms such as urban and urban renewal instead to raze whole neighborhoods and erect housing projects in the same racially segregated areas. discourse on urban and urban renewal therefore not only used the neglected areas of the cities as a metaphor for everything that was wrong with them. Furthermore, it effectively disguised housing segregarion and racial discrimination. Displaced residents of the declining areas, however, began challenging urban as an appropriate representation of their lives. As Robert Beauregard notes, the term urban renewal was parodied among blacks as Negro removal in the 1960s because the discourse that disguised acute racial discrimination culminated at this time (164-65). …

“Optimism of the Will”: Isabella Whitney and Utopia

Isabella Whitney's “Wyll” has been misrecognized generically because temporal utopias–of which her poem is the first instance–are not supposed to exist in the sixteenth century. Because women had a different relationship to the social and economic disruptions of emergent capitalism that gave birth to the genre in More's Utopia, however, female utopian thought is differently manifested as well. In the “Wyll,” the contradictions attending the moment of transition are embodied in the dissonant form of a poem that, in its first half, describes a city of abundance, and in its second, the dark side of the “same” London for the poor. Proposing that London should be abundant for all its inhabitants through a redistribution of the city's wealth and pleasures, the “Wyll” situates the utopian city in a yet unrealized future that readers, as executors, are enjoined to realize.

The Architecture of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Nazi Fantasy

In this article I examine the aesthetic properties of rural German architecture, Nazi ideology, and their manifestation at the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Architecture sutures together the gap between the ideological demands made on a people and the reality of those demands in their execution and spatial expression. Jacques Lacan’s theory of the Real and Slavoj Žižek’s theory of fantasy as the support for reality provide the theoretical framework from which I examine the architecture used at the camps. I posit a theory connecting the horror of the death camps, Nazi architecture, Volkish thought, and the Nazi utopian city of Auschwitz. I conclude that the convergence of these historical, architectural, and ideological aspects are evident in the buildings at Auschwitz I and Birkenau, and reveal how the practices of daily Nazi life and antisemitism work together to become a fantasy that sustains the consistency and meaning of Nazism.

Chapter 1 The Idea of ‘Sun cities’ in the Context of Globalising Processes

This chapter discusses the ways in which the ideological imposition of the Utopian Socialist vision of the city was fundamental to the Communist project of ‘moulding’ the new man for the new political system. It is suggested that the idea of this kind of city flourished in situations of economic, environmental and ecological crises. Starting from an analysis of Campanella's ‘Sun City’, it shows how in the twentieth century a romanticised conception of the Utopian city translated, in reality, into a system of cruelty, violence and infringement of moral norms. Firmly convinced of their pedagogic mission, the authorities ultimately denied people's (the proletariat's) participation in the political process through the implementation of such a devious project. The human resources involved were either recruited by means of ideological mobilization or came from the forced labour of the imprisoned dissidents who did not believe in such a mission.

From Possible Worlds to Future Folds (Following Deleuze): Richter's Abstracts, Situationist Cities, and the Baroque in Art

In this article I want to think through the notion of possible worlds as developed in Gilles Deleuze’s book on Proust and, more significantly, his book on Leibniz. In particular I want to produce an encounter between certain philosophical concepts - such as the monad and the fold - and a specific art practice, in this case the abstract paintings (or “Abstracts”) of the German contemporary artist Gerhard Richter. The art practice here is meant not as an illustration of the philosophy, rather the article attempts to think a kind of Deleuze-Richter conjunction, to set each alongside the other and in so doing produce a new kind of assemblage between the two. Indeed the article is an experiment in this sense, an exploration of the resonances between two kinds of thought which although logically distinct seem to parallel one another in their creative and affirmative character. Leading on from this conjunction I want to think a little about the “new” - or expanded - baroque as Deleuze understood it, and which might be characterised by the city, and especially the Situationist city as it was theorised in the writings of Ivan Chtcheglov. We might say that this fictionalised and utopian city is an example of the Deleuze-Leibniz monad being opened out onto an expanded field of inter-connectivity. We might also characterise this new baroque as the introduction of a logic of participation into art practice.

Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake

List of figures Preface Acknowledgements Note on the text and list of abbreviations 1. Blake, ideology and utopia: strategies for change 2. The ideology of instruction in Emile and Songs of Innocence and of Experience 3. The discourse of women's liberation in Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Europe and Visions of the Daughters of Albion 4. Edmund Burke and models of history in America, The Song of Los and The Four Zoas 5. The utopian moment in Rights of Man and Milton 6. The utopian city and the public sphere in Robert Owen and Jerusalem 7. Conclusion: the function of utopianism at the present time Notes Index.

The Meteorologically Utopian City

Despite the problems of our decaying cities, there will be an increasing need for greater urbanization for some time to come. Granted the necessity for the existence of towns, how should they be built and function? Widely divergent views have come from architects, engineers, economists, political scientists, and real estate developers. To this chorus of intellectual bricklayers, the meteorologist is a johnny-come-lately. The meteorological requirements to be considered in the optimal design of towns are discussed in this article.