Blueprints for an ideal community - Dreams and realities

BLUEPRINTS FOR AN IDEAL COMMUNITY

Historical studies of plans for ideal cities tend to be preoccupied with geometry and symmetry: they are all square, circular, polygonal or hexagonal. Aristophanes, in his play The Birds, makes fun of the concept of geometric cities, of Plato and his disciples and of all rigid planners of other people's futures.

The recurrence of geometric plans in utopias down the ages is partly explained, of course, by the nature of the walled and fortified towns of classical and medieval times, and party by the fact that all these schemes are what economists would call "models" or what sociologists would call "ideal types". If they were ever realized, they would be modified to accommodate existing physical features, artefacts and social institutions. There was little recognition of this among utopians before the humanist writers of the Renaissance.

The fifteenth-century Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti, for example, did not attempt to design an ideal city (although his projects include an ideal Fortress for a Tyrant, in which the palace is protected equally against the external and the internal enemy). He insists that it is enough to discover the principles that can be adapted to any site and the needs of the citizens.

During the Renaissance Europeans began to travel the world as a prelude to conquest and exploitation. The tales they brought back influenced a series of utopian books. Thus the hero of Thomas More's Utopia, Raphael Hythlodaye, is cast as a Portuguese sailor from the crew which sailed with the explorer Amerigo Vespucci.

More's book, written in Latin, takes the form of a discussion in the garden of a houe in Antwerp, between himself, Raphael Hythlodaye and a Flemish friend, Peter Gilles. Hythlodaye remarks that life is fairer in the island of Utopia, where property is owned by the community, than in the England of their day.

To prove his point, he describes the commonwealth of Utopia. Particular attention is givento the architecture and planning of utopian cities: "Their buildings are good, and are so uniform, that a whole side of a street looks like one house. The streets are twenty feet broad there lie gardens behind all their houes...every house has both a door to the street and a back door to the garden.... There being no property among them, every man may freely enter into any house whatsoever. At least every ten years they shift their houes by lots."

In More's ideal city everybody understands farming. Children learn it at school and in visits to the country. Everyone turns out to help at harvest time. If the population of any city grows, they do not build over the gardens, but "fill up the lack in other cities", or "build up a town in the next land where the inhabitants have much waste and unoccupied ground".

Utopian writing of the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century also used stories of the exploration of unknown regions as a device to criticize the familiar world of the European states. Even before Autralia was "discovered" by voyagers, the French writer Gabriel de Foigny published New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis (1676). He was the first utopian to conceive of a society without government. Following the French navigator Louis-Antoine de Bougainville's exploration of the islands of Oceania in the 1760s, Denis Diderot wrote his delightful Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage. Published posthumously, after the French Revolution, it consists of an imaginary conversation between an old man from Tahiti, who descibes the freedom and plenty that existed before the Europeans came, and a French sailor who tells him of the misery of the poor in pre-revolutionary France.

Worlds of industrial plenty

The nineteenth century changed everything, including utopias. The steam engine, iron and steel, the railway, the factory system and the huge growth of towns and cities all led to utopian writing which projected the pace of industrialization into the future. In 1816 the philosopher and economist Claue-Henri de Saint-Simon was already predicting that France and its population would be organized as one vast factory. Later in the century, in The Coming Race: or the New Utopia (1870), Lord Lytton foresaw a future in which machinery and robots would be powered by a new form of energy called vril. This was followed by another widely read indutrial utopia by the American writer Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888), in which the hero awakens from a hypnotic state in the year 2000. His host explains what has happened:

"The movement toward the conduct of business by larger and larger aggregations of capital, the tendency towards monopolies, which has been so desperately and vainly resisted, was recognized at last, in its true significance, as a process which only needed to complete its logical evolution to open a golden future to humanity.... When the nation became the sole employer, all the citizens, by virtue of their citizenship, became employees, to be distributed according to the needs of industry...."

The optimistic scientific utopias of the nineteenth century gave rise to a whole genre of deeply pessimistic anti-utopian literature in the twentieth: savage satires on the trends of industrial society by such writers as H.G. Wells, George Orwell and Yevgeny Zamyatin.

A simpler life

There also arose in the 1890s a stream of alternative utopian thinking, looking towards what we would now call a post-industrial, ecologically viable human society.

The English poet and craftsman William Morris was so outraged by Edward Bellamy's vision of the world as one vast factory that he wrote a history of the future that he wanted. In News from Nowhere, the author awakens in a future England which has abandoned not only factories but government and money too. It has become a nation of craft workers, delighting in making beautiful things, whose idea of a holiday is to row up the river to work in the fields at harvest time. The "big murky places which were once the centres of manufacture" have disappeared, and the ecological change in the human environment is the result of a change in the purpose of work.

Citizens of the future explain to the time-travelling Morris: "The wares which we make are made because they are needed men make for their neighbor's use as if they are making for themselves, not for a vague market of which they know nothing, and over which they have no control.... Nothing can be made except for genuine use therefore no inferior goods are made. Moreover, as we have now found out what we want, so we make no more than we want and as we are not driven to make a vast quantity of useless things, we have time and resources enough to consider our pleasure in making them. All workwhich would be irksome to do by hand is done by immensely improved machinery and in all work which it is a pleasure to do by hand, machinery is done without...."

Two contemporaries of Morris also had an immense concern for the details of productive workand the decentralization of human settlements. Peter Kropotkin, a Russian geographer and anarchist, argues in favour of mixing factory work with farm work, brain work with manual work, and town jobs with country jobs, in his Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899).

Looking at the enormous productivity of small workshops and horticulture as opposed to large-scale industry and farming, Kropotkin

claims that the future lies with the dispersal of both. The significance of this book, which gives it relevance almost a century later, is that it is a plea for "a new economy in the energies used in supplying the needs of human life, since these needs are increasing and the energies are not in xhaustibe".

Another utopian contemporary of Morris was an obscure English inventor and shorthand writer, Ebenezer Howard. The question he asked himself was very simple. How can we solve the problems of desperate overcrowding in the metropolitan city, with all the human misery it produces, and at the same time cope with the depopulation of rural areas from which the young and active escape precisely because of the lack of opportunities?

Howard's answer was the garden city. His book Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898) advocates a network of planned small towns, providing homes and employment and incorporating agriculture with industrial work, surrounded by a green belt, and linked by public transport to form a "Social City". It was very influential in the ideology of town and country planning. Howard himself founded two garden cities in the United Kingdom, Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City, and his work inspired the British government's New Towns programme after the Second World War.

Ecological utopian thinking

There is an extraordinary gap between the widely read utopian writings of the 1890s and the new environmental, ecological awareness that emerged in the 1970s, with its consciousness of the finite nature of the world's resources and the terrifying rate at which they are being exhausted. Few utopians have explored the implications of an ecologically aware civilization.

One notable exception is the American science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin. Her novel The Dispossessed (1974) presents the experiences of a visitor from one planet, where a Kropotkinian ethic of mutual aid has won a viable society from an arduous environment, to another planet where society is built upon self-indulgent consumerism. Another American novel, Ernest Callebach's Ecotopia (1975), carefully examines the dilemmas which would face a society which attempts to adopt a green or ecologically aware ideology.

One book that I would like to put into the hands of anyone interested in the connections between utopia, architecture and ecological consciousness is an older American exploration of utopian imaginings. This is Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (1947) by Paul and Percival Goodman. They were brothers, a poet and an architect, and they compiled this book during the Second World War as a modest and dissident contribution to the worldwide debate on "post-war reconstruction". Numerous works of this kind were produced in many countries, most of which have been completely forgotten. Communitas survives because, as the philosophe Lewis Mumford put it, it is the only modern contribution to the art of building cities which "deals with the underlying values and purposes, political and moral, on which planning of any sort must be based."

The Goodman brother saw a "community plan" not as a layout of streets and houses, but as the external form given to human activity: "There is a variety of town schemes: gridirons, radiations, ribbons, satellites, or vast concentrations what is important is the activity going on, how it is influenced by the scheme and how it transforms any schemes, and uses or abuses any site, to its own work and values."

Their book examines the three main types of city plan which had emerged in the previous hundred years, grouping them into Green Belt Plans, Industrial Plans and Integrated Plans. They see the first as a reaction against the ugliness and squalor of the factory system--attempts to recreate pre-industrial values, or to live decently with industry. Next they turn to city plans centred on production, with an absorbing discussion of forgotten urban utopias dreamed about in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and of the technological solutions appropriate to an advanced economy put forward by the American engineer Buckminster Fuller. His "Dymaxion" house, conceived in 1929-1932, was based on the mass production of lighweight self-sufficient houses which did not require public utilities, but did depend on an industrial system in the background.

Finally the Goodmans examine those utopian plans which integrate city and country, such as American architect Frank Lloyd Wright's dream of Broadcare City where the whole population is dispersed over the entire countryside and dependent on small farming and vaguely decentralized industry. This formula was more effectively argued for many years by another American, Ralph Borsodi, who declared that by cutting out the costs of transportation and marketing and a host of middlemen, at least two-thirds of the goods and services required in a home could be more efficiently produced domestically with electrically powered tools.

Yet the brothers were sternly realistic. They had the honesty to emphasize, rather than minimize, the fact tht we all have different utopian dreams. Aware that someone's utopia is someone else's hell, they arrived at three quite different formulae for ideal communities.

The first is the City of Efficient Consumption, which can be recognized in most European or American cities today. The second, the New Commune, is an idealized version of the small workshop economy that actually sustains the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna today.

The third, in which they envisage a two-level economy, they call Maximum Security: Minimum Regulation. Everyone would be obliged to work for a short time (as in military conscription) in a basic economy, attending the machines which provide food, clothing and shelter, distributed free to all. The rest of the time would be occupied in a luxury economy in which the choice of activity is left to the individual. Needs such as medicine and transport would be taken care of by a financial arrangement between the subsistence economy and the secondary economy. This solution may well prove instructive to politicians seeking to resolve the contradictions between the ideology of a welfare state and the virtues of a free market.

COLIN WARD is a British author whose many books include Anarchy in Action (1973), The Child in the City (1978), Arcadia for All (1984) and Welcome, Thinner City (1989).

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