Utopian cities continue to appeal

An investment firm headed up by Bill Gates, the former head of Microsoft and a multi-billionaire, has invested US$80m into a proposed ‘smart city’ in Arizona, USA. The community, to be known as Belmont, “will create a forward-thinking community with a communication and infrastructure spine that embraces cutting-edge technology, designed around high-speed digital networks, data centres, new manufacturing technologies and distribution models, autonomous vehicles and autonomous logistics hubs," according to Belmont Partners, the real estate investment company involved in the deal.

Spread over 25,000 acres, Belmont will provide everything the modern tech-savvy person or family might need. Everything from schools, to shops, to office space will be built from scratch in a flexible manner that, theoretically, will plan ahead for infrastructure needs well into the future. Whether this project ever comes to fruition is a different question, but it is encouraging that at least some of the billionaires on earth seem to be planning for the future. If Belmont becomes a working reality then it could prove to be a decent model for a future where we will need to build more and more urban living environments.

The other possibility is that Belmont joins the ranks of utopian visions from history which never made it off the drawing board and into the real world. It can even be argued that the main point of these utopian visions isn’t to become real. Instead, are they meant to act as more of a spur for the imagination? A spark which can shift the collected dreamscape of society? If they can achieve that, then do they need to be made real? Are they not real already? Many non-existent cities have successfully left a legacy despite having only been around for a fleeting period of time, if at all:

Octagonal City

Henry Clubb, a city designer and vegetarian activist from the 1800s, might agree. He designed Octagonal City for the Vegetarian Kansas Emigration Company which was planned to be a settlement purely for vegetarians. The octagonal houses were inspired by a scientific idea that it was the perfect shape to allow in the optimum amount of sunlight – which is, of course, incorrect – and the project failed fairly miserably. 60 families from across the USA turned up but found only a single log cabin. The city was not a success, but there are a number of octagonal houses in Kansas today which continue Clubb’s legacy.

Fordlandia

Another attempt at a utopian city came courtesy of Henry Ford, a man known around the world for being an atrocious human being, but also one who helped to shape modern manufacturing lay the groundworks for consumerism and globalisation.

Ford’s idea for a utopian city, Fordlandia, summed up these ideals quite neatly. It was his attempt to build the perfect American town in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. Fordlandia included a power plant, golf course, library and hospital as well as housing for the employees who worked on the rubber plantations. Henry Ford himself insisted that the people there lived traditional ‘American’ lives which included regular consumption of hamburgers as well as prohibitions on alcohol and premarital sex. In addition, Ford tried to force everyone to work “proper 9 to 5” days in the heart of the Amazon. This led to riots and eventually the closure of Fordlandia. The city is still rotting away in the rainforest to this day.

Garden City

1902 saw the publication of a treatise called Garden Cities Of To-Morrow by a social reformer called Ebenezer Howard. In it, he outlined his plan for a city where people would live in perfect harmony with nature across 6,000 acres. The housing for 32,000 residents would take up only 1,000 of those acres and the rest would be parks, farms and green spaces with wide, pleasant public roads.

These garden cities sound like the most obviously utopian idea out of all the cities in this article, but Howard’s ideas actually turned out to be the most successful of them all to date. Garden Cities Of To-Morrow led to the proliferation of suburbs around major cities, which when you think about it are not far from the idea of the sort of low-density satellite towns around a central hub that Howard originally imagined. In addition, he actually managed to lay down a city – Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire, England which were trailblazers for the larger garden city movement which still exerts influence on town planners more than a century later.

Utopian ideals

Architects big and small throughout the world have been fascinated by the idea of the perfect city, probably since the first town planner designed the first city thousands of years ago. No one sets out to make a bad city after all, and architects as a group can tend toward the starry eyed when they consider their craft. People as famous as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright have been seduced into designing their perfect cities in the past. As proven by Bill Gates, this is a trend which is likely to continue long into the future.