Urban utopias

Utopia tends to generate a bad press: it is regarded as impracticable, nostalgic, or contradictory; most often it is perceived as being unable (as a supposedly perfect world) to admit the change necessary in a self-determining society. Literary Utopias, such as Thomas More’s Utopia, specify the daily life of the envisioned ideal society to an extent that is over-prescriptive and distant from contemporary reality. This
level of prescriptive detail also tends to inform nineteenth-century utopian theory, in which designs for an ideal society obscure its inherent contradictions. The same desire to create a better world is central to Western Modernism, though in that case it is contradicted by a privileging of design and professional expertise over the tacit, experiential knowledge of those who live in alternative settlements.
But literary accounts need not be taken literally – they may not be perfect worlds at all – and can be read in a more ordinary way as critical reflections on the writer’s world. Similarly, utopian designs reflect perceived injustices in the conditions in which they were produced. And when utopian ideas idealize the past or an imagined future in aesthetic terms this, too, can be regarded as an oblique critique. As objects
of study, all such utopian texts and images are open to critical understanding, though this may appear to achieve little in the face of an onslaught of social and environmental destructiveness.

Hope may appear somewhat academic, or restricted to global activism and resistance to a system of which the default position is social division and environmental destruction. Yet there are thousands of alternative settlements today where people from diverse backgrounds have built a new society in intentional communities, ecovillages, permaculture settlements, urban communes, rural religious and secular retreats, co-housing projects and activist squats.

My intention in this book is to bring together insights gained from meeting people in alternative settlements with those gained from utopian histories and theories, so that each can be understood in ways grounded in the other. I offer no definition of an ideal utopian society, nor of its appropriate built architecture, because the lesson of practical utopian or alternative settlements is that they are not ideal but real places, where much of the daily practice of a new society consists of finding ways in which people can collaborate on an equitable basis, respecting rather than obliterating difference. Utopia is thus incomplete, an always unfinished project.

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