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Past Projects : 2004 - 2007 : Building Ideals - Practical Utopias
Utopias are models for the future; practical utopias emphasize what can be built. In the hundred or so years up to the second world war, urbanists around the world proposed utopian solutions to the problems of living in the industrial city. They wrote about and designed many such model communities and they built a smaller number. In the six decades since that time many more have been constructed. This project, a collaboration between the Design Center's Ann Forsyth and Katherine Crewe from Arizona State University, provides an overview of these "practical utopias" or model communities built from the period of the end of the second world war through the early twenty-first century. It examines their key assumptions and intellectual histories, reviews important examples, assesses how well the built environments functioned once built, develops a classification of such model communities, and proposes likely future developments. It argues that the least socially and ecologically idealistic models have been the most replicated, pointing to the limits to social change through built form.
The project extends earlier work on planned communities.
Status: Ann Forsyth is continuing the work at Cornell.
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