Modernity, Utopia, and the City

Essay Proposal

Utopia and imagination play a key role in architecture, urban planning and the

development of modern cities. This essay will endeavour to explore the role the city as a

contested landscape, a space where philosophies clash, ideologies ferment, and

civilizations come to be defined. The city is a place that is inherently related to space,

with geographical boundaries the city blends together the public and the private.

Dwelling, labour and commerce all take place within the city, yet it is also a place where

the imagination is encouraged—where utopian visions can manifest into concrete reality.

Studying the architectural and urban planning developments respective to the Athen’s

Charter, CIAM and ideas of those such as Le Corbusier, this essay will seek to question

the role of the city as a harbinger of utopianism. In doing so, I hope to question the

popular logic of urban planning as an imaginative and utopian endeavour, instead using

evidence to show that the bureaucracy and administrative aspects of urban development

gives way to reproductions of dominant class relations. I hope to show how the city has

become dually a site of imagination and subjugation, a place where individuals who

control the means of production can use as a personal playground; whilst also showing

how utopia and imagination fragment as one moves down the rungs of the social

hierarchy.

In Modernity and Utopia, form and function are explored by John R. Gold in a chapter

that suggests “the search for the ideal city has been long-standing, generating contrasting

ideas of what the modern city ought to be” (Gold, 2008, p. 67). The author explains how

movements in architecture contrast social ideals. The set pieces of urban architecture—

triumphal arches, wide boulevards, and accessible redevelopments—has enabled many to

consider what an ideal city might look like. Yet the author also explains how form and

function and the development of the city also must not be considered without social class,

and that the resulting patterns of urban development has been contested and resisted by

some.

Hence, this essay will explore the role of architecture and the philosophical idea of

utopia, touching upon some of the main tenets of this idea while critically assessing the

role of CIAM and the Athen’s Congress.

The central thesis this essay will argue is that the idea of utopia in modern architecture is

a false one, and that productive forces of capitalism tend to stratify urban developments

along clearly delineated social hierarchies making gentrification impossible to do

without.

Annotated Bibliography

1. Gold, J.R. (2008). The Sage Companion to the City: Modernity and Utopia. SAGE

Pulication Ltd, 67-86. doi: http://dx.doi.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.4135/

9781446211694

In Modernity and Utopia, form and function is explored by John R. Gold in a chapter that

suggests “the search for the ideal city has been long-standing, generating contrasting

ideas of what the modern city ought to be” (Gold, 2008, p. 67). The author explains how

movements in architecture contrast social ideals. The set pieces of urban architecture—

triumphal arches, wide boulevards, and accessible redevelopments—has enabled many to

consider what an ideal city might look like. The resulting analysis provides an in-depth

analysis of how form and function with respect to the ideal city. A good example of this

trend is Le Corbusier Gold argues, who worked on schemes not just to develop the ‘city

of towers’ principle, but along through his work on linear schemes that reconfigured the

functions of the city in corridors centred on high-speed transport routes. The Gold

reading articulates perfectly how the desire to create an ‘ideal city’ became rendered by

those such as Le Corbusier in both form and function, inclusive of changes in the

arrangement of land-use, with the business and industrial districts bordering residential

areas, intended to reduce internal travel times by using utopian approaches to housing and

dwelling units that reflected settlement along a spinal transport corridor, clever land use

and planning; indeed a utopian shift towards the planning of the city and re-articulation of

its manifestation in both form and function. Yet, while Gold outlines how functional land

use can function with respect to a utopian ideal, particularly in the work of Le Corbusier,

he fails to address how changes in terms of segregation and speculation on land use can

occur along a socio-economic axis.

2. Gold, J. R. (1998). Creating the Charter of Athens: CIAM and the functional city,

1933- 43. Town Planning Review, 69(3), 221-243. doi:

http://dx.doi.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.4135/9781446211694

Gold (1998) begins by outlining the origins of the Athens Charter, supposedly produced

by the Fourth Congress of the Congress International Architecture Modern (CIAM).

Using neglected primary documents, Gold (1998) examines the origins, revisions, and

final version of the Athens Charter produced between 1933 and 1943, going through the

important names, dates and revisions of the document. Gold argues that by 1943 Le

Corbusier proceeded with synthesizing the original documents with less compromise:

“his rationalist interpretation of the Functional City held that the keys to urbanism were

found in the four functions. Plans could determine the structure of each of the sectors

allocated to the four key functions and they will also determine their respective locations

within the whole. The cycle of daily functions would be regulated with the strictest

emphasis on time saving. Road networks, as noted above, would be reorganized

according to the functional needs of the different types of traffic that they had to

accommodate. By its completion, the Athen Charter came to act as the defining document

relating to Le Corbusier’s and CIAM’s vision of the ideal city, combining form with

function and intelligent land-use, planning and development as a fourfold system that still

today serves as the foundation for modern architecture and plans for the future city. Gold

(1998) summarizes the main tenets and ideology that endowed architects such as Le

Corbusier and CIAM with the desire to create functional cities based on a fourfold system

of planning.

3. Fishman, R. (1987). Bourgeois utopias: the rise and fall of suburbia. New York, Basic

Books, 1-17. http://lgdata.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/docs/1099/1308468/

Bourgeois_utopias.pdf

In Bourgeois utopias: the rise and fall of suburbia (1987) Fisherman argues that new

forms of architecture and planning, exemplified by CIAM and the principles of

segregation, have created massive suburban development that is more than just a

constellation of residential, industrial and business areas; “it expresses values so deeply

embedded in bourgeois culture that it might also be called the bourgeois utopia”

(Fishman, 1987, p. 2). In contrast to the ideal city as a partial and utopian paradise,

Fisherman states that “this ‘utopia’ was always at most a partial paradise, a refuge not

only from threatening elements in the city but also from discordant elements in bourgeois

society itself” (1987, p. 4). Fisherman emphasizes how the development of cities in

attractive locations often have a distinctive focus on consumption. He articulates how

corridors of movement in modern architecture are predicated on the automobile, and how

this creation of a suburban metropolis signals a fundamental relationship in the urban

core. With a particular emphasis on class and the notion of bourgeois society, Fisherman

convincingly argues that planning and urban development have enabled the contraction

of great cultural centres facilitated through transportation and the notion of suburbia,

which at best remains a tenuous association, as the emergence of urban concentration and

density continues to spread in areas beyond the city centre. The emergence of peripheral

communities and the suburb as a hub of residential suites has clear connections to class,

as Fisherman quite successfully presents, yet what remains to be seen is how class

analyzes of architecture and urban planning and development can yield insightful

considerations with respect to planning and design. More research could be developed in

the planning specifics that relate to class and how defining the core from the periphery in

urban development both conforms and negates CIAM’s original principles contained with

the Athens charter.

4. Hall, P. (1988). Cities of Tomorrow: Cities of Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell, 2-12.

http://lgdata.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/docs/1099/1308469/

Cities_of_tomorrow.pdf

In Cities of Tomorrow (1988) outlines the anarchist roots of the planning movement and

how supposedly ‘organic’ aspects of city planning development along a much less

structured axis than proponents of CIAM and the Athen’s Charter typically like to admit.

Accordingly, Hall (1988) argues that while it is harder to fix the philosophical and

theoretical roots of the ideal city to figures such as Le Corbusier, the fact is that other

determinants of growth enabled city planner to construct an ideal version of the city that

moved beyond the dichotomies and strict hierarchies of Le Corbusier’s and CIAM’s

utopian system. This vision is connected to the order of transportation technology, which

Hall asserts owes much of its development to an inherently anarchistic mode of thought.

The origins of this order deeply influenced Le Corbusier and the regionalists, Hall

asserts: “to be sure, it was very definitely untrue of Corbusier, who was an authoritarian

centralist, and of most members of the City Beautiful movement, who were faithful

servants of finance capitalism or totalitarian dictators”(1988, p.3). Instead, the anarchist

pioneers such as Howard, of Geddes and the Regional Planning Association of America,

as well as many derivatives on the mainland of Europe, a vision which reflected anarchy

as not merely an alternative urban form, but of an alternative society that was inherently

un-bureaucratic, unhindered by the teething demands of Fordist industrial organization,

residential segregation; while ultimately serving as a techno-transportational ideal and

system of planning synthesis by the theoretical proclivity towards anarchism.

5. Mumford, L. (1961). The city in history: its origins, its transformations, and

its prospects. London: Secker & Warburg, 3-28. http://lgdata.s3-website-us-east-

1.amazonaws.com/docs/1099/1308472/The_city_in_history.pdf

Mumford (1961) explores the origins of the city respective of migration and settlement.

He explains how ancient society is rooted in these systems, “at every level of life one

trades mobility for security, or in the reverse, immobility for adventure” (p. 6). The

author argues that as human life developed along a conjecture between stability and

movement, so too did the development of urban patterns, settlements, indeed the entire

spinal architecture of transportation networks including trains, roads, and water ways,

which he argues stabilized modern infrastructure in a way that provided a foundation for

economic stability, trade, and societal evolution. The author is quick to augment his

analysis with signs and symbols of ancient by gone ages including He analyzes how

cemeteries and shrines emerged as a distinctive demarcation of the village, as did the

richness of food and water supply networks. I’m reminded of the development of the

Roman aqueduct and how important that aspect was to the dissemination of empire

during Ancient times. The article by Mumford (1961) helps explain the city developed in

terms of an ancient trajectory, with clear lineage and relations to sites of economic

activity, food supply, dwelling, and social activity. What Mumford (1961) fails to

articulate is how the city transformed along an axis of development with modern systems,

ignoring the role played by Ancient Rome and civil engineering developments such as

paved roads, the aqueduct and city-squares. The article highlights how tools and issues

including survival played into the formation of communal spaces where one could buy,

sell and trade staples for food and shelter. In addition, the erasability of movement and

the features of ancient migratory patterns can be attributed to modern developments and

sites of utopian and urban development, including the eventual CIAM and changes to

urban planning facilitated by the likes of Le Corbusier and the Athens Charter.

6. Ravetz, A. (1986). The government of space: town planning in modern society.

London: Faber and Faber, 7-12.

http://lgdata.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/docs/1099/1315474/

GGRA03_The_government_of_space.pdf

In the government of space, town planning in modern society, Ravetz (1986) explains

that the lineage of modern American cities is indebted to major practices of urban

planning and engagement complicated by whole environments and philosophical

concerns as they apply to architectural planning. According to Ravetz (1986), “with the

addition of an industrial distribution policy designed to counteract economic decline, this

led to comprehensive system of land use planning where, as well as controlling building

and property development, the production of an ideal environment was regarded as one of

the main tasks” (p. 7) used by planners in government, under strict influence of the

controls and details to conventional measures promoted by among others CIAM and the

Athens Charter. Ravetz (1986) argues the origins of the industrial city meant a wave of

enormous productive capacity being released as a way to sustain the building

environment, which also lead to the formulation of suburbs where workers built

dwellings. The crassness of rapid industrial development is also explored by the author,

which in addition to the productive capacity of society allowed for an informal economy

to emerge along unregulated streets where vendors made way for drugs and prostitution

as the industrial economy gave individuals a place where the lumpenproletariat could let

off steam. Yet, the historical trajectory of serious urban planning and the development of

the American city can be seen with respect to the changing nature of work and

employment, indeed “town and planning was redefined as ‘planning’ during this era,

which set about a fundamental reshaping towards massive and large scale, with new

found metropolises emerging as a site where migration and labour became focused. With

the advent of the Industrial economy the American city and aspects of planning all

emerged in earnest immediately after World War II, which Ravetz (1986) points out with

clarity as planning changed into a rational science developed along the urban theories

posited by CIAM and the Athen’s Conference.

7. Relph, E. (1987). The Modern Urban Landscape. Baltimore: The Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1-10.

http://lgdata.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/docs/1099/1308476/

The_modern_urban_landscaape.pdf

According to Relph (1987) in The Modern Urban landscape, the familiar and all-

embracing terrain of modern cities was not always as apparent. Relph (1987) points out

that the landscape and visual contexts of daily existence is fundamentally altered when

we examine the nexus of class, architecture, land use and development patterns. As the

urban landscape developed to include densely populated metropolises with shopping,

dwelling and labour all contained in rationally planned layouts, the late 20th century

existed as a cornucopia of cities whose orientation occurred along a more organic and

less controlled trajectory. The modern urban landscape developed in Europe as densely

populated urban centres such as Paris shifted from Medieval plans (narrow, winding

streets) into a well-planned and thought out urban layout with an emphasis on

technological innovations in order to fuel the growing industrial economy. In cities such

as Toronto, Chicago, Montreal and New York, the embellishment of the urban landscape

occurred hand in hand with utopian speculation, that the city could somehow become a

magical playground where dreams were realized. Yet, as we have seen this notion of

urban experience remains an issue fundamentally relative to class and access. Indeed for

some the urban centre have become a ghetto dwelling with little chance of success,

imbued with extreme poverty and also negate social determinants of health that coincide

with living in such challenging quarters. According to the author, understanding these

aspects of the modern landscape is useful for the role reason that cities and societies are

developed almost exclusively with an eye towards the future. Against this idea, utopian

notions and the comforts of socialism as a human form of organization came to be

typified in many urban plans, which certainly still resonate with many architects and

planners today.

8. Sewell, J. (1993). The Shape of the City - Toronto Struggles with Modern

Planning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, xiii-xvii. http://lgdata.s3-website-us-

east-1.amazonaws.com/docs/1099/1308479/The_shape_of_the_city.pdf

In The Shape of the City—Toronto Struggles with Modern Planning, the author explores

how many ideas emanating from the CIAM and Athen’s Conference came to be typified

in the booming Canadian metrpolis. The author uses particularly relevant examples from

the 1960s on, including the subversion of much of the downtown core and land use

appropriation policies that went into building the new Toronto city Hall. The author uses

the concept of the megapolis to express some bitter reservations about how suburbia

came to play such a leading role in developing the city, explaining that suburbia offers

poor facilities for meeting, conversation, collective debate and common action—it

favours silent conformity, not rebellion or counter attack (p. xv). As a result, suburbia has

become the favoured home of a new kind of absolutism: invisible but all powerful. I think

this article shows how the megapolis with a particular emphasis on transportation

emerged in the city of Toronto that sought to apply a rational model of planning through

centralization and city bureaucracy.

Revised Critical Reading Notes

Peter Hall- The City of Dreadful Night

Mearns describes the Victorian middle class, in particular the terrible living conditions in

the slums that existed during this time. Inclusive of this are situations and scenarios

difficult for us in modern times to image, such as living with pigs and even their dead

children. Another shocking thing is that most of the houses are brothels filled with girls

less than the age of 12. As we can see the moral level is really low, and because they

were extremely poor many problems arise, they have no fresh water, not enough food,

and do not have the money to move out and seek cheaper housing facilities. In terms of

working conditions, there were no handbooks on how to guide workers safely, nor any

regulations to protect wages. People were very low paid, therefore they were forced to

live close to their workplace, even though the rent is high, because they could not afford

the high transportation cost as well there were no public transit at that time. Increasingly,

the workforce came to live in close proximity to their place of work, which resulted in

higher rent while wages either stagnated or remained the same. In 1880s, London was

undergoing a mini-haussmannization, and in 1886 the working class rose in an

insurrection, where they broke windows and shops simply because they no longer could

endure the disgusting living conditions they found themselves in. Accordingly, many

believed that to quantify the problem, one could simply divide the working class into four

distinct sub-groups, which made up approximately 35% of the total population (citation).

And later, Jane Addams (year) started building Hull House of community services, and

inclusive of her goal was to provide a social space for young people where they could go

receive a quality education. as to educate young people. Importantly, this attests to how

ideas can serve to solve community crises and the critical role played by education in

advancing social opportunities while mitigating civil unrest. The Booth measurement and

journalism both served to expose the poor conditions, and the intervention of government

into public housing is also evidence of this. Before government entry into public housing

people lived in incredibly derelict dwellings. Indeed, all kinds of problems and solutions

helped shape the city today and through studying these developments we can begin to see

the progress of modernity as it relates to urban development and precise nature of

regulation and government intervention into planning.

John Friedmann - The Good City: In Defense of Utopian Thinking

John Friedmann introduced several key elements of how to define a utopian city under an

achievable manner. The definition of utopian thinking according to Friedmann is “the

capacity to imagine a future that departs significantly from what we know to be a general

condition in the present” (Friedmann, 2002, p. 462). Utopian thinking can be something

very unrealistic, but it can also be very helpful to correct injustice, without any thought of

living in a better city, we will never think of ways to improve the city. There are two

moments in utopian thinking: critique and construction vision. Utopian thinking is not

new, there are over 200 years of writing on utopian thinking and more or less educate the

planners. Under the theoretical consideration, Friedmann sees the importance to search

for the “common good”, and we are told that the process is as equally important as

outcomes, a good city should also has a committed form of political practice, in which a

collective power or group is brought together by a leader, and they must have sufficient

power that is symbolic and moral in order to overcome any barriers. The first element of

Good City is to have human flourishing as a fundamental human right, Friedmann defines

it as “Every human being has the right, by nature, to the full development of their innate

intellectual, physical and spiritual potentials in the context of wider communities.”

(Friedmann, 2002, P.466) It also means that everyone is equal since they were born no

matters they are men or women, and the idea of basic equality such as public education,

public health etc. to make everyone chance of living more balance. Another element is

multipli/city as a primary good, in definition multipli/city mean “an autonomous civil life

relatively free from direct supervision and control by the state.” (Friedmann, 2000,

P.467) Michael Walzer calls a civic society ‘a project of projects, which means people

are interrelated to each other and are responsible to one another (Walzer,1992, P.107).

The idea of diversity, mutual tolerance of difference must be protected by the state as

population growth mainly comes from migration. In turn, there implies citizen obligation

and respect of human rights. Furthermore, there are four factors to support the material

base for the good city: 1) socially adequate housing, 2) affordable healthcare, 3)

Adequately paid job, 4) Adequately social provision, this is the mean of vibrant civil life.

“A good city is a city that cares for its freedom” (Friedmann, 2002, p. 469) The last

element is good governance, with Friedmann's emphasis on political process is equally

important as an outcome, and should involve a variety of participants in the process. The

governing system should include 3 actors, according to Friedmann: politicians and

bureaucrats, state and civil society. In utopian thinking, it is to put citizens at the top of

the governance pyramid, to form a political community. Friedmann also introduces six

criteria for assessing the performance of a system of city-regional governance: 1) inspired

political leadership 2) public accountability 3) transparency and the right to information

4) inclusiveness 5) responsiveness 6) non-violent conflict management (Friedmann,

2002, p. 470).

Edward Relph – The Modern Urban Landscape

The notion of Landscape has changed over the years in terms of character and scale,

which gives us some useful insight on how the traditional landscape differs from the

modern landscape. Relph states that a building is not an isolated object, it is rather with a

context, related with the surrounding area, and it is also the “products of technological

developments and social circumstances” (Relph, 1987, p.3). Relph does not include every

aspect of landscape but focus on the built environment of cities. In modern landscape,

standardization is promoted so that it fits to build in anywhere, however differences do

exists, some factors including different design standard, the supply and the cost of

building materials do play a role. In addition, Relph introduce four elements to explain

the distinctiveness in historical landscape and similarity in modern cities, they are

architecture which has different aesthetic principles; technological innovations affect the

way we build; planning to protect utopian vision of good health, justice and equality; and

social developments influence the consumer and corporate landscape. It is also important

to note that new technologies invented in building as well as new form of communication

reduce the chance for regional adaption, which traditionally ideas are constrained by

travel time that there was a variety of landscape base in local customs and architecture.

Ideas can flow freely, which sharing, copying, and borrowing of ideas are very common,

all these will lead to similarity in modern landscape.

References

Fishman, R. (1987). Bourgeois utopias: the rise and fall of suburbia. New York, Basic

Books, 1-17.

http://lgdata.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/docs/1099/1308468/

Bourgeois_utopias.pdf

Friedmann, J. (2000). 'The Good City: In Defense of Utopian Thinking.' International

Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24(2): 460 - 472. doi: 10.1111/1468-

2427.00258

Gold, J.R. (2008). The Sage Companion to the City: Modernity and Utopia. SAGE

Pulication Ltd, 67-86. doi: http://dx.doi.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.4135/

9781446211694

Gold, J. R. (1998). Creating the Charter of Athens: CIAM and the functional city, 1933-

43. Town Planning Review, 69(3), 221-243. doi:

http://dx.doi.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.4135/9781446211694

Hall, P. (1988). Cities of Tomorrow: Cities of Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell, 2-12.

http://lgdata.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/docs/1099/1308469/

Cities_of_tomorrow.pdf

Hall, P. (2002).Cities of Tomorrw: an intellectual city of urban planning and design in the

twentieth century. Malden MA: Blackwell, 13 - 47. http://lgdata.s3-website-us-

east-1.amazonaws.com/docs/1099/964997/HallCityOfDreadfulNight2002-1.pdf

Mumford, L. (1961). The city in history: its origins, its transformations, and

its prospects. London: Secker & Warburg, 3-28. http://lgdata.s3-website-us-east-

1.amazonaws.com/docs/1099/1308472/The_city_in_history.pdf

Ravetz, A. (1986). The government of space: town planning in modern society.

London: Faber and Faber, 7-12. http://lgdata.s3-website-us-east-

1.amazonaws.com/docs/1099/1315474/GGRA03_The_government_of_space.pdf

Relph, E. (1987). The Modern Urban Landscape. Baltimore: The Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1-10. http://lgdata.s3-website-us-east-

1.amazonaws.com/docs/1099/1308476/The_modern_urban_landscaape.pdf

Sewell, J. (1993). The Shape of the City - Toronto Struggles with Modern

Planning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, xiii-xvii. http://lgdata.s3-website-

us-east-1.amazonaws.com/docs/1099/1308479/The_shape_of_the_city.pdf