The utopian visions of three of urban planning’s greatest visionaries. Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, hated the cities of their time with an overwhelming passion. The metropolis was the counter-image of their ideal cities, the hell that inspired their heavens. In this book Robert Fishman examines the utopian visions of three of urban planning’s greatest visionaries. Howard created the concept of the “garden city” where shops and cottages formed the center of a geometric pattern with farmland surrounding; Wright conceived of “Broadacre City,” the ultimate suburb, where the automobile was king; and Le Corbusier imagined “Ville Radieuse,” the city of cruciform skyscrapers set down in open parkland.

Utopia tends to generate a bad press - regarded as impracticable, perhaps nostalgic, or contradictory when visions of a perfect world cannot accommodate the change that is necessary to a free and self-organizing society. But people from diverse backgrounds are currently building a new society within the old, balancing literal and metaphorical utopianism, and demonstrating plural possibilities for alternative futures and types of settlement. Thousands of such places exist around the world, including intentional communities, eco-villages, permaculture plots, religious and secular retreats, co-housing projects, self-build schemes, projects for low-impact housing, and activist squats in urban and rural sites. This experience suggests, however, that when planning and design are not integral to alternative social formations, the modern dream to engineer a new society cannot be realized. The book is structured in four parts. In part one, literary and theoretical utopias from the early modern period to the nineteenth-century are reconsidered. Part two investigates twentieth-century urban utopianism and contemporary alternative settlements focusing on social and environmental issues, activism and eco-village living. Part three looks to wider horizons in recent practices in the non-affluent world, and Part four reviews a range of cases from the author’s visits to specific sites. This is followed by a short conclusion in which a discussion of key issues is resumed. This book brings together insights from literary, theoretical and practical utopias, drawing out the characteristics of groups and places that are part of a new society. It links today’s utopian experiments to historical and literary utopias, and to theoretical problems in utopian thought.

A noted urban historian traces the story of the suburb from its origins in nineteenth-century London to its twentieth-century demise in decentralized cities like Los Angeles.

Visions of the City is a dramatic history of utopian urbanism in the twentieth century. It explores radical demands for new spaces and ways of living, and considers their effects on planning, architecture and struggles to shape urban landscapes. The author critically examines influential utopian approaches to urbanism in western Europe associated with such figures as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, uncovering the political interests, desires and anxieties that lay behind their ideal cities. He also investigates avant-garde perspectives from the time that challenged these conceptions of cities, especially from within surrealism. At the heart of this richly illustrated book is an encounter with the explosive ideas of the situationists. Tracing the subversive practices of this avant-garde group and its associates from their explorations of Paris during the 1950s to their alternative visions based on nomadic life and play, David Pinder convincingly explains the significance of their revolutionary attempts to transform urban spaces and everyday life. He addresses in particular Constant's New Babylon, finding within his proposals a still powerful provocation to imagine cities otherwise. The book not only recovers vital moments from past hopes and dreams of modern urbanism. It also contests current claims about the 'end of utopia', arguing that reconsidering earlier projects can play a critical role in developing utopian perspectives today. Through the study of utopian visions, it aims to rekindle elements of utopianism itself. A superb critical exploration of the underside of utopian thought over the last hundred years and its continuing relevance in the here and now for thinking about possible urban worlds. The treatment of the Situationists and their milieu is a revelation. David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, City University of New York Graduate School

Originally published: New Brunswick, N.J.: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, c1990.

Arguing that planning in practice is far more complicated than historians usually depict, the authors examine closely the everyday social, political, economic, ideological, bureaucratic, and environmental contexts in which planning has occurred. In so doing, they redefine the nature of planning practice, expanding the range of actors and actions that we understand to have shaped urban development.

Urban planning in today's world is inextricably linked to the processes of mass urbanization and modernization which have transformed our lives over the last hundred years. Written by leading experts and commentators from around the world, this collection of original essays will form an unprecedented critical survey of the state of urban planning at the end of the millennium.

"In Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century ... three plans are presented in depth. Working from hitherto unpublished layouts, sketches, manuscripts, and letters, the author has reconstructed the fascinating historical context out of which the plans emerged ... Fishman shows the utopian origins of all three plans, the social innovations that the architects hoped to achieve, and their heroic but vain attempts to impose a 'perfect' design on an imperfect world"--Dustjacket.