utopia

What is interesting about the word utopia is that it possesses both a positive and a negative meaning. Positive, which is its primary use and as defined by the dictionary, is an imaginary place and a place of ideal perfection and social condition, which some strive for and believe that lays somewhere in the future. Negatively, defined as an impractical scheme for social improvement, the term is used to describe something which is too advanced- goal that is un-reachable.
All three texts deal with both, the positive and negative, which seem to probably go hand-in-hand, rather than either-or, when talking about utopia.
All three texts look at the possibilities of and desires for achieving this place of perfection, and the failures of doing so. Lewis Mumford is the only one whose thesis in Utopia, The City and the Machine tries to argue that utopia actually did exist and that “the concept of utopia is not a Hellenic speculative fantasy”, but that “indeed, the first utopia was the city itself”(Mumford, 3). Even though this is a speculative thought, what is more interesting to note in this statement is that utopia is equated with the city. In Sadler’s article New Babylon versus Plug-in City, Constant’s New Babylon and Archigram’s Plug-in City are hypothetical projects of hyper-structures also striving for utopia in the form of a city.
Marvelous works for their time, the Plug-in City and New Babylon respond to the current need for change evoked by the “disappearance of the working class” (Sadler, 65) post the industrial and mechanical revolution and its replacement with the new mobile “leisure class”.
The word ‘avant-garde’ continuously comes up when reading all three articles. Our desire for control and advancement, instrumented by science and technology is what allows us to constantly look ahead in search for what Plato regards to as a “self contained unit”, that is enough self-sufficient to “have enough land to feed its inhabitants and make it independent of any other community” (Mumford, 5).
Utopia, in the positive sense, is in the future and only avant-garde and progressive thinking can bring us closer to utopia, which constantly gets re-defined. Does this mean that the state of utopia is actually un-achievable, and the positive notion of utopia will always go together with the negative, as un-reachable goal? I do not know, but “the only limits to what might be accomplished… were those of the human imagination” (Mumford, 13)