Utopia

According to Mumford ”the first Utopia was the city itself” (p3). He describes the creation of ancient cities as the creation of utopia. Unfortunately the utopian city is very fragile and the distance between the utopia and the dystopia is not that great. Mumford mentions isolation, fixation, regimentation, standardization, militarization as attributes to the utopian city. Later in the Mumford reading the utopia is called: “sterile dessert” (p10). A very negative description.

Fustel de Coulanges and Bachofen describes the city as a religious phenomenon with the primary function to create order. The city was an ideal form “a glimpse of eternal order, a visible heaven on earth, a set of life abundant- in other words, utopia.” (p13). On page fifteen again there is the description of the unstable condition of the utopia. Almost immediately it changes to its opposite, the dystopia. To create the utopia there needs to be a collective force. Described by Mumford as the human machine, the platonic model of all later machines.

The Plug-in city and New Babylon looked forward towards the end of labour and towards automation. New Babylon looked into the far-distance and Plug-in city to the near distance. New Babylon tried to create new social places, without an exact recipe. Peter Cook and Michael Webb with their plug-in city were more interested in the creation of an organizational system with smaller individual units. In both New Babylon and The Plug-in city the working class had disappeared. Sadler writes: “convinced that the qualities of the everyday could be enhanced by design, and that technology could lift the passions of humanity from the quaqmire of the street into the city of the sky”. The vision of a modern utopia.