IN DEFENCE OF UTOPIAN URBANISM: IMAGINING CITIES AFTER THE END OF UTOPIA

IN DEFENCE OF UTOPIAN URBANISM: IMAGINING

CITIES AFTER THE END OF UTOPIA
by
David Pinder

Pinder, D. 2002: In defense of utopian urbanism: imagining cities

after the end of utopia. Geogr. Ann., 84 B (34): 229241.
ABSTRACT. What is the role of utopian visions of the city today?
What is their use at a time when, for many people, the very concept
of utopia has come to an end? Taking a wide perspective on contemporary debates, this paper addresses the general retreat from
utopian urbanism in recent years. It connects it with the so-called
crisis of modernist urbanism in the capitalist West as well as forms
of utopic degeneration, and assesses some of its implications. Arguing against the abandonment of utopian perspectives, it advocates a rethinking of utopianism through considering its potential
function in developing critical approaches to urban questions. The
authoritarianism of much utopian urbanism certainly needs acknowledging and criticising, but this need not entail a retreat from
imagining alternatives and dreaming of better worlds. Instead, it is
necessary to reconceptualise utopia, and to open up the field of utopian urbanism that for too long has been understood in an overly
narrow way. The paper suggests the potential value of developing,
in particular, modes of critical and transformative utopianism that
are open, dynamic and that, far from being compensatory, aim to
estrange the taken-for-granted, to interrupt space and time, and to
open up perspectives on what might be.

Unfortunately, the sclerosis apparent in our

cities also reigns in our heads. No one believes
any more that we can build that city on a hill,
that gleaming edifice that has fascinated every
Utopian thinker since Plato and St Augustine.
Utopian visions have too often turned sour for
that sort of thinking to go far. Gloom and pessimism are more common are Beirut, Sarajevo or even Los Angeles, with its riots and
smogs, the only future we can envisage?
(Harvey, 1993, p. 18)
The Utopian impulse at the heart of so many
experiments in city-building has always
proved disappointing, if not downright disastrous, in the actual flesh and stone. Much has
been written about why this is so perhaps
enough to discourage any further attempts at
Utopian thinking about the city. But the Utopian impulse is, and will hopefully remain, an
irrepressible part of the human spirit.
(Sandercock, 1998, p. 1)

Geografiska Annaler 84 B (2002) 34

Introduction
Turning to questions of utopia might seem one of
the more surprising moves in contemporary intellectual debates. Yet current stirrings of a revival of
interest in utopia within academic, literary and museum worlds seem apparent.1 A desire at the beginning of the millennium to take stock of the traumatic events of the twentieth century as well as the history of attempts to imagine and construct ideal societies is no doubt playing a part. Perhaps, too,
there is something of a rediscovery of the pleasures
of fantasies and wish projections. However, the
critical and political dimensions of such an engagement with utopianism are less often drawn out. The
tone of discussion tends to be elegiac with many
critics bidding farewell to promises and projections
of radical change from the perspective of an age
that seems somehow after utopia.
The End of Utopia, writes Stephen Bann, is
a concept that seems to suit our contemporary experience of society and politics on the world scale
(Bann, 1993, p. 1). In a commentary on architecture
and urban planning, Rosemarie Haag Bletter concurs: the literal meaning of utopia, no place, has
been so reified that today utopia (no place) usually
has no place in a constructive discourse (Bletter,
1993 p. 48). Instead she finds a creeping, incremental pessimism, which might be called the absence of hope about the future (p. 47). More angrily, Russell Jacoby laments the passing of utopian thought in his book The End of Utopia, and connects it with a loss of critical perspectives on the
present that he sees as currently incapacitating intellectual debates. We are increasingly asked to
choose between the status quo or something
worse, he argues. A utopian spirit a sense that
the future could transcend the present has vanished. In using the term utopian he refers to the
notion that the future texture of life, work and even
love might little resemble that now familiar to us.
I am alluding to the idea that history contains possibilities of freedom and pleasure hardly tapped.
This belief is stone dead (Jacoby, 1999, pp. xixii).
229

DAVID PINDER

Such remarks have a familiar ring. Recent decades have seen numerous critics in a wide variety
of arenas ready to proclaim the end of utopian
thought. Unlike those cited above, such as Jacoby,
many of these critics have welcomed the news.
They have argued that utopianism has too often
been driven by authoritarian ideals, and too closely
associated with totalitarianism, and that therefore
its demise should be celebrated or at least met with
equanimity. They have often linked its fate to recent social and political events and to contentions
about the movement of history itself, with many
drawing sustenance from the collapse of the state
socialist bureaucracies in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. For it was those
events in particular that led some commentators to
declare not just the end of socialism as an ideal,
and with it the traditional Cold War challenge to
Western capitalism, but also the end of the very
idea of alternative visions of a good society.
What place was there now for utopian thought,
these critics demanded, when we have supposedly
witnessed the triumph of liberal democracy and
the end of history?2 Does utopia not belong on
the scrap heap or in the equivalent of those desolate
parks on the outskirts of former state socialist cities, where statues and other monumental paraphernalia of old regimes have been left to live out their
days in a ghostly existence, as little more than sites
of touristic spectacle? Should the concept of utopia not be erased like the names of those luminaries that once adorned street signs in socialist cities
to be replaced by signs from a supposedly more respectable past? After all, was it not the utopian impulse that originally helped to lay the foundations
for such social experiments and their authoritarian
efforts to remould societies according to a projected ideal?
Hostility towards utopian thought is nothing
new. The twentieth century saw many negative depictions of ideal states, most famously including
novels such as Evgeny Zamyatins We (1920), Aldous Huxleys Brave New World (1932), Arthur
Koestlers Darkness at Noon (1940), and George
Orwells Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). There were
also many attacks on utopianism from within the
auspices of social theory and political thought, as
exemplified in works around the mid-twentieth
century by Karl Popper, Walter Lippmann and Friedrich Hayek among others. Indeed, strong currents
of criticism have accompanied the notion of utopia
from its beginning with some of the most vociferous denunciations coming especially, though defi230

nitely not exclusively, from those of a conservative

or self-proclaimed pragmatic persuasion. Opposition has often involved arguments about utopianisms supposedly illusory or even dangerous nature, and it has taken the form of projections associated with anti-utopias. The commentator
Joachim Fest is forthright in contending that the
failure of socialism in particular marks the end of
the over two hundred years old belief that the
world can be radically changed through an imaginary image. The power of great promises has
gone, he claims, in a book grandly entitled The
Shattered Dream: About the End of the Utopian
Age. But he regards such developments positively,
believing that people are tired of grandiose ideal
worlds which have left an unending trail of horrors
(Fest, 1991, cited in Faulenbach, 1995. p. 139).3
Combined with such arguments have been claims
that the concept of utopia is fundamentally on the
wane, that a long-heralded twilight of utopia is finally upon us (Manuel and Manuel, 1979).
In this paper I want to take a wide perspective on
themes raised in this special issue on spaces of utopia and dystopia by focusing on utopian urbanism.
My aim is to defend the value of utopian perspectives in developing critical approaches to cities and
processes of urbanisation. These perspectives are
understood as involving the expression of desire for
a better way of being and living through the imagining of a different city and a different urban life.
The paper is part of a broader project that is concerned with addressing strands of utopian urbanism, in the belief that there is much to learn from
earlier attempts to open up visions of cities, to imagine how they might be otherwise (Pinder, 2001,
forthcoming). Here I consider the apparent retreat
from utopian urbanism and connect it with the socalled crisis of modernist urbanism as well as current forms of utopic degeneration. I also assess
some of the implications of such a retreat. It will be
my contention that, although the rejection of many
utopian approaches to urban issues is understandable and indeed a positive development, entailing
an assessment of past failures and a principled opposition to the authoritarianism of such projects, a
loss of utopian perspectives in their entirety has disturbing political and cultural consequences, not the
least of which is a narrowing of critical thought and
a moving away from the anticipatory moment of
critique. However, in the final part of the paper I indicate more positive sources that are available for
rethinking the place of utopia in urban studies. This
does not involve proposing a unifying vision that
Geografiska Annaler 84 B (2002) 34

IN DEFENCE OF UTOPIAN URBANISM: IMAGINING CITIES AFTER THE END OF UTOPIA

can organise a singular emancipatory project. Instead, I suggest taking a different approach that
seeks what is possible and what could be from
within the conditions of the present as a means of
intervening in space and time. I argue that it is necessary to leave behind the authoritarianism and
static projections typically associated with the concept of utopia, and to rethink the potential functions
of utopian urbanism in an era all too ready to jettison the very idea of utopia as such.
No place for utopianism?
The city has long been a subject for utopian longings and hopes for a better future; it has also been
the focus of social fears, despairs and dystopian imaginings. This paradoxical intertwining and double-sidedness continues into the present and is a
major line of tension running through urban imaginations (Massey, 2000). Yet, as David Harvey
notes in the quotation at the start of this paper, scepticism towards the concept of utopia pervades
much recent urban thinking. This is the case not
only in planning and architectural circles but
among a range of those thinking and writing about
cities and urban living. In Harveys recent texts on
the subject he describes how attitudes to the city
have been bound up with changes in processes of
urbanisation since the early 1970s, and in particular
with forces of capital accumulation, uneven spatiotemporal development, and patterns of migration
(Harvey, 1996, ch.14). He presents a number of
scenes from current urban worlds that are being
forged out of such processes. They range from cities in advanced capitalist countries marked by huge
job losses, stark inequalities, concentrations of impoverishment, and increasingly stressed physical
and social fabrics including cases in Britain and
the USA where there has been a haemorrhaging of
wealth, population, and power, such as Liverpool
where the population fell by 40 per cent between
1961 and 1991, and Baltimore where it declined by
more than 30 per cent over the same period to the
enormous and quite different problems and challenges associated with rapid urbanisation in developing countries. The dynamic nature and sheer
scale of such issues, for which statistics can give
only the barest of indications, continually threaten
to elude current conceptual apparatuses as does the
apparent intractability of the social problems. For
many, notes Harvey, to talk of the city of the twenty-first century is to conjure up a dystopian nightmare in which all that is judged worst in the fatally
Geografiska Annaler 84 B (2002) 34

flawed character of humanity collects together in

some hell-hole of despair (ibid. p. 404).
In his discussion of cities in advanced capitalist
countries, Harvey argues that one of the distressing
features about the current situation has been a reluctance to address the future possibilities and the
potential for imagining and conceptualising radical
urban change. A blas attitude towards urban decline has been common especially in the USA and
Britain in recent decades, he suggests, and this attitude has been connected historically with an antiurbanism that has been content to turn its back on
the problems of urban areas and to imply that cities
themselves are at the root of societys troubles, or
that cities as usually conceived are somehow irrelevant to the needs of the future (ibid. p. 406). It has
involved a disengagement from urban questions by
sections of those in positions of power and privilege, and the growing acceptance of what he scathingly terms a politics of contempt and neglect
(ibid. p. 408; see also Lowe et al. 1995). In such a
climate, Harvey asserts that much creative urban
thinking concentrates not on how cities and processes of urbanisation might be transformed fundamentally in terms of social justice or a progressive
political project but on how to escape from urban
ills, or on how those with money and power might
be insulated from the conditions of the so-called
underclass and urban others through selective
regeneration and the construction of new forms of
segmentations, barriers and walls (see also Blakely
and Snyder, 1997; Marcuse, 1995; Soja, 2000, ch.
10; MacLeod and Ward, this issue). While the interests of real-estate developers and finance capital
enjoy an increasing influence in many capitalist cities and while pockets of urban space enjoy a renaissance or boom, other parts of the city become
constructed as a place of decay, strife, abandonment, even as something that is disappearing or that
has died. If attitudes have been relatively pro-urban
in much of continental Europe, then the revival of
many city centres in those countries has similarly
left sharply divided landscapes, with areas of decline tending to agglomerate on the peripheries of
urban areas.
Harvey takes up these issues again in his book
Spaces of Hope. Early in the book he contrasts images of the city in the film La Haine (1995), based
around a day in the life of a group of young men living in suburban public housing schemes in Paris,
with those of Jean-Luc Godards film Deux ou trois
choses que je sais delle (1966), which was animated by a radical and relatively hopeful spirit in ad231

DAVID PINDER

dressed emerging landscapes in the same city.

Utopian longing has given way to unemployment,
discrimination, despair, and alienation, Harvey
notes with respect to the former film. Repressions
and anger are now everywhere apparent The city
incarcerates the underprivileged and further marginalizes them in relation to the broader society
(Harvey, 2000, p.11). He later substantiates the
bleak imagery through snapshots from sharply divided and poverty-stricken cities that again include
Baltimore. He is especially concerned by the dominance of a central message, promoted by corporate
and big money interests, that denigrates any challenges to the ideology of the free market, and that
leads to the endless repetition of Margaret Thatchers famous phrase: There is no alternative. At a
time when the language of alternatives is declared
outdated if not impermissible, it appears that the capacity to imagine and conceptualise social transformation and different urban futures the very essence of utopian urbanism is itself thrown into
doubt.
Utopian collapse and the crisis of
modernist urbanism
The current situation outlined above contrasts dramatically with earlier periods of the twentieth century. John Gold reviewed the idea that there was a
transition in urban sensibilities some years ago in
an essay entitled The city of the future and the future of the city. He compared the situation of the
mid-1980s with that of the late 1960s, a decade that
witnessed a flourishing of utopian energies when
there were numerous writings, futurological studies and attempts to outline what might be possible
in relation to urbanism. Along with many other
commentators concerned with a transition in attitudes to the city, he identified the key turning point
as being the economic crisis and recession of the
early 1970s. Within the last fifteen years matters
have changed drastically, he wrote. The advocacy
of alternative urban visions has all but ceased and,
indeed, there is little active debate about the future
city other than the projection of current doubts and
anxieties into the near future (Gold, 1985, p. 92).
While he conceded that many previous visionary
schemes were deeply flawed and based on false assumptions, and while he was therefore critical of
their problematic forms, he nevertheless applauded
the desire to debate such issues. He contrasted this
willingness to think about possible futures with
what he claimed is a current vacuum in urban
232

thinking, a vacuum that he believed afflicted our

understanding of the future city and thus that had
potentially damaging implications for the future of
the city itself. Elsewhere he explicitly asked the
question as to whether what was being experienced
was the death of the urban vision? (Gold, 1984).
Believing that a positive response was possible, he
called for a willingness to learn from the failure of
modernist visions while at the same time stimulating a debate about the potential for a balanced approach that is still prepared to pose vital questions
about a desired urban and social future, in particular: what sort of city for what sort of society?
(ibid. p. 380).
The above diagnoses connect with what Kevin
Robins has identified as a profound and long-term
crisis of the city and of urbanity (Robins, 1991, p.
9). He suggests that the crisis is associated with the
scale of physical and social problems in cities, including the ways in which inequality, segmentation
and alienation have been inscribed in contemporary urban landscapes. But it is also connected to
the way that the very idea of the city has been
thrown into question. There is a crisis in what urban
culture and identity might mean and in what Robins
refers to as the imaginary institution of the city. In
recent years, he argues, there has been a kind of
imaginative collapse: what was once driven by vision and energy is now drained of affect. He thus
asserts: The utopian has collapsed into the banal.
We do not plan the ideal city, but come to terms
with the good enough city (ibid., p.11, emphasis
in original). Elsewhere, in an essay about the city in
the field of vision, he again describes a sense of crisis in relation to the urban imaginary. When we
think about cities now, he notes, we are likely to
talk in terms of fragmentation, disintegration, disenchantment, disillusionment: in terms of something that is falling apart or losing its imaginary
charge (Robins, 1996, p. 132). In this case, he relates the shift to what he describes as a dislocation
in the structure of the citys visibility.
The implications of such a situation are potentially far-reaching and disturbing for those concerned with developing a critical approach to urban
questions. What are the consequences of such an
imaginative collapse? What dreams are among
those said to be dissipating? Who is experiencing
this feeling? What are the prospects for projects
still committed to radical urban and social change?
Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears,
wrote Italo Calvino in his much-cited book Invisible Cities (1979 [1972]), and the sentiment indiGeografiska Annaler 84 B (2002) 34

IN DEFENCE OF UTOPIAN URBANISM: IMAGINING CITIES AFTER THE END OF UTOPIA

cates a crucial aspect of the geographies of urban

areas. Cities are imaginary as well as real spaces;
they are constituted by dreams and desires, conscious and unconscious longings and fears, along
with material developments and practices. Questions about the ways in which cities are imagined
and about how these imaginings are realised in particular urban settings are of considerable importance in the development of a critical understanding
of urban experiences and their spaces, and they are
also significant politically, being intertwined in
how cities may be thought about, conceived and
lived. As Robins puts it, the imaginary institution
of the city defines the scope the possibilities and
their limits within which, at any particular time,
we can imagine, think and experience city life; it
defines the aesthetic and the intellectual field within which cities will be designed, planned and engineered (Robins, 1991, p. 10).4 It is this imaginary
dimension of the city and of urbanity that he suggests is in a state of crisis.
Talk of a collapse of utopian thinking is often
presented as part of a familiar story about the history of modernist architecture and urban planning.
Specifically, it appears within a tragic narrative of
modernisms depletion or even fall through critical rejections of its visions of transforming the urban environment, and in response to changing economic and political conditions that failed to provide the means by which its proposals might have
been realised. Utopian thought has long been a vital
force in urban planning, and it has been highly influential in transforming urban landscapes around
the world. Visions of cities run through the history
of planning discipline and practice, with utopian
schemes for the fundamental redesign of urban
spaces providing inspiration and framing the terms
of debates for many more pragmatically minded
planners and architects. Utopian projects thus feature prominently in a number of accounts of modern urban planning (see e.g. Fishman, 1982; Hall,
1984, 2002). The years around the turn of the twentieth century were especially significant for the development of visions of cities in Europe and North
America. Out of a maelstrom of urban change
emerged numerous streams of utopianism that influenced urban planning, including notably those
promoted by Ebenezer Howard and the Garden
City movement. Their schemes took root in mainstream debates, albeit through shedding much of
their commitment to social change to become a
mode of environmental reformism framed narrowly within the emergent professional planning pracGeografiska Annaler 84 B (2002) 34

tice. A utopian model also runs through much early

modernist architecture and urbanism that also
helped to shape mainstream thinking within planning, evident in ideas associated with Le Corbusier
and the Congrs internationaux darchitecture
moderne (CIAM).5
Despite the diversity of these movements, they
are frequently based on the projection of ordered
spatial forms. These spatial forms provide the settings for ordered, harmonious societies, in which
the ills of the present day are banished to another
space and time. In the will to transformation, issues
of space are privileged in the assumption that if
these are sorted out then social matters will follow.
Urbanism becomes the key to changing society,
to use a metaphor favoured by Howard and Le Corbusier among others. Their ideal becomes the construction of a city of salvation. The disjuncture
between their imagined ideal and the fallen present
is construed as a means of creating different ways
of seeing and understanding the city, and of awakening energies that will bring about change.
The sense of hope embedded in such utopian
projects has now passed, or so it would seem. The
years around the turn of this century have been
characterised by a spirit closer to anti-utopianism.
It is not only that earlier utopian visions of cities are
viewed as no longer being able to meet the needs
and complexities of the time. More fundamentally
they have been subjected to widespread criticism
and condemnation, being held responsible by many
critics for authoritarian attempts to remould urban
space and behaviour according to abstract and supposedly universal rules, and for enabling the conceptualisation and production of an environment
that denies differences and local identities.
Through its attempts to take a spatial form as a goal
for a better urban future, and through its attempts to
remake the environment in the image of that form,
this kind of utopian urbanism has been denounced
as inherently oppressive. Hence Harveys point
quoted above that, if the utopian dream of building
that city on a hill no longer seems so appealing to
many people, this is in part because of the feeling
that Utopian visions have too often turned sour for
that sort of thinking to go far.
In the view of Jonathan Raban, there is nothing
new in such disappointments. He associates them
with a long tradition of urban thought. The city has
always been an embodiment of hope and a source
of festering guilt: a dream pursued, and found vain,
wanting, and destructive, he writes in his book Soft
City, which appeared in 1974, a year often taken as
233

DAVID PINDER

being at the cusp of the period of transition. [W]e

have grown used to looking at Utopia only to discover that we have created Hell (Raban, 1988,
p.17). The contrast between recent attitudes and
those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is nevertheless considerable in many respects. Noting one popular view, Elizabeth Wilson
comments: Then, utopians, planners and architects believed that the only solution was to scrap the
existing unplanned, irrational cities and build new,
planned ones. Today, by contrast, planning, planners and architects are blamed for having caused
the current state of our cities by their overweening
interference (Wilson, 1991, pp. 150151, emphasis in original). In this vein Alice Coleman even
adopted the analogy of a trial in her study that explicitly condemned the utopian design of post-war
planned housing in Britain. She went so far as to argue that it is the Utopian design imposed upon
post-war Britain that appears to be the chief factor
in many aspects of social decline in new or redeveloped areas (Coleman, 1990, p. 173). In her account, utopia is duly accused. The evidence and
suspects are gathered, the case for prosecution and
the cross-examination made, and the scene set for
a verdict of Guilty and for the passing of sentence (ibid. p. 99).
Other commentators may recoil from Colemans
arguments with their ideology of defensible space
and their reactionary reinforcement of ideas about
privatism, which chimed neatly with aspects of the
Thatcher governments thinking about housing and
public space in Britain (it should be noted further
that the work of Oscar Newman on which she drew
has itself become a key influence on aspects of urban design especially in the USA) (Newman, 1973;
Harvey, 1996, pp. 292, 408). But these arguments
point to the link so often made in recent times between modernist urbanism and utopian visions of
the city, with the decline of one being understood
as intrinsically bound up with the other. When Robins discusses the crisis of the city, he therefore
does so specifically in terms of the exhaustion and
crisis of the modernist vision and programme
(Robins, 1991, p. 11). And when Gold refers to the
death of the urban vision, he does so in terms of the
growing disillusionment in Britain during the
1970s with the modernist dream for the planned
reconstruction of the urban landscape. After outlining how modernist tenets were adopted in the period of postwar reconstruction and in particular used
to inform the production of high-rise public housing projects, Gold discusses how they were subse234

quently rejected as many of those projects were

condemned and in some cases even detonated
(Gold, 1984). In this way a critique of specific
forms of postwar urbanism has often slid into a denunciation of the utopian urban impulse per se.
Utopic degeneration and postmodern
urbanism
Engaging with attitudes towards urbanism from the
early 1970s led many commentators to refer to an
emergence of postmodern urbanism. This is not
the place to enter into the extensive and well-worn
debates surrounding the meanings of this term that,
following developments in architecture during the
1970s, became the focus of considerable discussion among geographers and urban theorists
around the mid-1980s and is still pressed into service for various causes (see e.g. Dear, 1995, 2000;
Ellin, 1995; Watson and Gibson, 1995; Soja, 2000).
What needs highlighting here is that, first, the shifts
in the above attitudes took place within the context
of changing economic and political conditions that
are themselves crucial to understanding the crisis
of the city and of urbanity addressed by Robins.
Foremost here are the kinds of accounts produced
by Harvey of how issues of architecture, planning
and urbanism may be understood in connection
with restructurings at the level of capitalist economies, regimes of capital accumulation and modes
of urban governance (Harvey, 1989a, 1989b). Other critics have similarly argued that recent urban restructurings have challenged the identities of cities
and places and led to the emergence of new urban
forms, although some have been more insistent on
the need to develop new paradigms of critical
thinking capable of responding to these conditions
in a manner that goes beyond the historical-materialist theorising favoured by Harvey into more variegated post-Marxist fields (e.g. Dear, 2000, Soja,
2000). Either way, it is clear that the stalling of early modernist ambitions in planning and architecture, with their desire for spatial and social change,
has to be understood not merely at the level of ideas
but in relation to such economic and political conditions.
The second point to emphasise is that postmodern architecture and urbanism were understood
from the beginning as anti-utopian. This is not to
deny that at times and places they had utopian characteristics. Rather, it is to say that they were typically projected, in their opposition to the ambitions
of modernist approaches, as being against utopian
Geografiska Annaler 84 B (2002) 34

IN DEFENCE OF UTOPIAN URBANISM: IMAGINING CITIES AFTER THE END OF UTOPIA

attempts to transform space and society. Writing

about postmodern architecture in the issue of Architectural Design that first popularised the notion
in 1977 under the editorship of Charles Jencks, the
architectural critic Paul Goldberger argued that it
had philosophical roots that emerged from the
modest, anti-utopian impulse, from a belief in incremental movement rather than cataclysmic
change (Goldberger, 1977, p. 257).6 A politically
progressive dimension to this approach has been
explored by those investigating the potential for a
postmodernism of resistance in the urban landscape and the possibilities for more democratic
notions of participation in planning processes.
They have advocated an urbanism based around recovering local meanings and identities and reconnecting to particular places and histories, and for
them a crisis of modernist urbanism brings with it
a sense of opportunity. David Ley and Caroline
Mills, for example, write of moving away from an
elitist and alienating agenda that they associate
with modernist planning towards a more inclusive
and participatory approach based on a dialogic
model, which recognises the need to respond to different voices and demands (Ley and Mills, 1993, p.
268).7 As an example they discuss tentatively the
processes behind cooperative housing in Vancouver and the political opportunities and forms of resistance made available by such a shared project.
At the same time, however, there was a widespread retreat from fundamental claims about
changing cities and social life. Writing about New
York City at the end of the 1980s, Goldberger asserted that there is no utopia, and instead advocated settling for a new realism in relation to the
city. He was happy to remind people that the city
has been marked traditionally by social divisions
and to contend that, while the failures of recent developments and especially the devaluation of the
public realm may have contributed to worsening
conditions, including the growing indifference to
the idea of common social bonds between its inhabitants, there was wisdom in accepting what is
there, of accepting certain social patterns and certain aspects of the physical form of cities as they exist (Goldberger, 1989, p. 30, cited in Boyer, 1994,
p. 475). Leaving aside the debates to be had on the
opposition he constructed between different kinds
of change, Boyer rightly responds to the implications of his complacent brand of realism in robust
terms. She argues that its focus on the piecemeal renewal of the citys faades and tableaux not only
leaves other needs unaddressed, but it helps to mask
Geografiska Annaler 84 B (2002) 34

the spatial politics involved in the processes of restructuring, and fails to challenge the way that images and representations of the city have been colonised by private concerns. As she puts it: If the
spectator is mired in realistic narrations and offered
no utopic visions, what will produce a disposition
for social change, an inclination to draw affinities
across all the spaces and peoples of the city? What
moral authority can be drawn on to challenge the
private claims that have distorted the public
sphere? (Boyer, 1994, p. 476). Boyers disquiet at
the supposed fate of utopia and the way discussion
of urban futures seems to have become increasingly foreclosed in recent years, and her attempt to recall a sense of utopianism back into the urban field,
raises important issues that need to be explored further.
Boyers criticisms are directed against the turn
away from progressive planning and innovation in
Manhattan and towards processes of Disneyfication. Writing at around the same time and remarking on Disneys growing dominance in shaping
parts of the city, Michael Sorkin similarly argued
with respect to the architectural field that the proprietorship of anticipation has been almost completely ceded and that visionary roles have been
either coopted or renounced (Sorkin, 1991, p.
273). Where a visionary style in architecture was
once so prominent, he argued, it was now remarkable only for its absence. Urban schemes have become characterised by what he called the projection of a muzzy and spurious past authenticated by
putative links to local tradition. The result, he
scathingly announced, was an urban arena awash
in trumped- (often Trumped-) up history (ibid. p.
3).
In such a climate, many utopian scenes that do
appear and it perhaps goes without saying that
they continue, despite the obituaries are distorted
echoes, part of a pastiche of former values. In an
amusement arcade, a classic utopian urban plan reappears as a computerised memory flicker. Once
a glorious figure for the future, symbolising the
promise of technological progress and social transformation, it now suggests some hideous hallucination of the present (Wilson, 1991, p. 12).8 Much
utopian urbanism takes the form more widely of
utopic degeneration, to borrow Louis Marins
well-known phrase from his account of Disneyland
as an actually existing utopian space. In using the
term, Marin is concerned with how utopic representation remains within dominant values and ideologies rather than offering a mode of critique, and
235

DAVID PINDER

how it may take on the status of myth or collective

fantasy (Marin 1990 [1972]). Such spaces of degeneration in contemporary cities are disconnected
from wider transformative projects, turned in on
themselves, no longer intent on radiating outwards
in that transformative move that was central to utopian conceptions of the modernist urban structure.
Proliferating beyond Disneyland proper to encompass a wide range of urban developments, they are
frequently marked by spectacular architectural entertainments and fantasy spaces that are ordered,
secure, not to mention underpinned by surveillance
and control, as Harvey notes in his sharp criticisms
of what he calls the developers utopia of renewal
projects at Baltimores Harbour Place and elsewhere. Generalising from Marin, Harvey argues:
The multiple degenerate utopias that now surround us the shopping malls and the bourgeois commercialized utopias of the suburbs
being paradigmatic do as much to signal the
end of history as the collapse of the Berlin
Wall ever did. They instantiate rather than critique the idea that there is no alternative,
save those given by the conjoining of technological fantasies, commodity culture, and endless capital accumulation.
(Harvey, 2000, p. 168)9
In such areas, utopia is cast in terms of the market
and global capitalism an ideal space of free exchange and consumer satisfaction, running
smoothly with flows of money and commercialised
desire (and here we should recall Fredric Jamesons
important reminder that the market is just as utopian as socialism has recently been held to be; see
Jameson, 1991, pp. 260278).10
Not surprisingly, then, many critics assessments of the place of utopianism are bleak. Today,
progressive utopias are scarcely in demand, writes
Klaus Scherpe, articulating a common concern;
rather, the metropolis requires a profitable trade
with images and experiences and a postmodernist
faade architecture that stages the historical to jazz
up the present(Scherpe, 1992, p. 72). For Richard
Bolton, postmodern culture can be seen more widely as merely decadent modernism; no longer
able to sustain the fantasy of utopia, we cynically
remain tied to its shell of illusions (Bolton, 1988,
p. 92). Also troubled by the status of utopian urbanism is Susan Buck-Morss. Noting that postmodern
architecture was concerned initially with attempting to improve the social space of cities, she shares
236

the belief of Harvey and others that the economic

and political situation of the time undercut notions
of urban reform, and that as a consequence the postmodern became a means of justifying the lack of
coherent urban policy. She points critically to the
melange of urban styles that deny responsibility for
present history, and to the neo-, post-, and retroforms that are used to overlay contemporary conditions. These forms, she argues, reproduce the
dream-image, but reject the dream. They are part
of a wider attitude:
In this cynical time of the end of history,
adults know better than to believe in social
utopias of any kind those of production or
consumption. Utopian fantasy is quarantined,
contained within the boundaries of theme
parks and tourist preserves, like some ecologically threatened but nonetheless dangerous
zoo animal. When it is allowed any expression
at all, it takes on the look of childrens toys
even in the case of sophisticated objects as if
to prove that utopias of social space can no
longer be taken seriously; they are commercial ventures, nothing more.
(Buck-Morss, 1995, p. 26)
Re-thinking the place of utopian
urbanism
What might be made of utopian urbanism today?
What potential is there for an oppositional utopianism that seeks to trace alternative possibilities for
what cities might become? Is there, indeed, any value in trying to revive a way of thinking that might
seem, finally, to have come to an end? In some respects, a notion of ending might be seen as allowing
greater freedom in thinking about cities, a loosening of the hold of ideals and teleological notions of
historical progress that are imposed externally or
from above. This is the case at least in relation to the
authoritarian and static schemes common to many
of the dominant traditions of utopian thought about
cities that seek to realise a fixed ideal of a spatial
and social order. Talk of an imaginative collapse
in that context smacks of nostalgia for a unitary
voice or a single, grand vision whose demise
should, on the contrary, be welcomed for allowing
space for the articulation of different needs and desires. It might further suggest that the feeling of
collapse and the disquiet that it engenders is centred around a quite particular group of people, those
thinkers and theorists who have been most unsetGeografiska Annaler 84 B (2002) 34

IN DEFENCE OF UTOPIAN URBANISM: IMAGINING CITIES AFTER THE END OF UTOPIA

tled by the undermining of their assumptions about

the use of knowledge to legislate for the future, and
by the displacement of their ideals by the claims of
diverse interests (cf. Bauman, 1987). Instead of
pining after the previous schemes of would-be legislators, it could be argued that what is needed is a
critical engagement with the current complexities
of urban spaces and processes.
A rejection of authoritarian utopian schemes and
a questioning of the basis of ideals are, in my view,
necessary steps in developing critical and potentially emancipatory approaches to thinking about
urbanism. An abandonment of the oppressive nature of certain forms of utopianism should therefore certainly be welcomed. But at the same time,
claims about the end of utopia are themselves disquieting. They involve a turn away from the anticipatory moment of critique that is aimed towards
considering how things might be different. In its extreme form, they are symptomatic of a closing
down of the imaginative horizons of critical thinking and even a slide into a reactionary acquiescence
to dominant understandings and representations of
cities and to the injustices of existing conditions,
akin to those end of history arguments which
claim that we [and an obvious question is who is
this we?] cannot picture to ourselves a world that
is essentially different from the present one, and at
the same time better (Fukuyama, 1992, p. 46, emphasis in original). Critical social theory contains
an anticipatory-utopian element, meaning that its
analyses are conducted in the name of a better future. Interpretations of current conditions and crises are made in light of the possibilities and potentialities of a more humane society, with radical social change rather than crisis management or technical control in mind. As such, the anticipatoryutopian element is an essential complement to critical theorys explanatory-diagnostic aspect, allowing examination and critique of the present to look
towards a future transformation that it aims to encourage (Benhabib, 1986, pp. 225227). If the anticipatory-utopian element within critical urban
studies is deadened or even lost, and with it the
sense of critique in the name of social change, then
this should be a matter of considerable concern.
So how might responses be formulated to the situation outlined above? Before developing an argument based on reviving a sense of utopian urbanism
in the present, two brief points should be made.
First, there is a risk of overplaying the monolithic
status of the spaces of utopic degeneration discussed above. In some of the literature, it is as if all
Geografiska Annaler 84 B (2002) 34

alternative readings of these spaces are necessarily

written out in advance: that, in the attempt to convey the enclosing and alienating nature of what is
being targeted, critics neglect the possibilities for
other perspectives and points of struggle. The more
compelling the portrait presented of degenerate
utopias, the more the critic succeeds in conveying
the closing of hopeful horizons, the less other readings seem possible. It should be noted, however,
that even in some of the most apparently bleak assessments of spectacular urbanism, there are gaps
and opportunities for struggle, and the developments themselves may be read in ways that exploit
such gaps as well as uncover the desires that remain
embedded within the developments as the basis for
oppositional politics.11
Second, it is important to be critical about declarations about the end of utopia. The notion of
utopia coming to an end is not new or unique to
present circumstances. Indeed, as Andreas Huyssen has pointed out, such obituaries have been written and rewritten repeatedly over the years, and
during the twentieth century the discourse of the
end of utopia is as endemic to the utopian imagination as its visions of other worlds, other times, or
other states of mind (Huyssen, 1995, p. 85). It is
therefore necessary to consider carefully what is
being said to be coming to an end, and what forms,
trajectories and interests are involved. In so doing
it becomes clear that, while certain kinds of utopian
thinking may have faded away or lost credibility, it
does not follow that utopianism as such has done
so. Besides those strands of utopianism associated
with the market and neo-liberal ideologies mentioned above, a case for which it is worth recalling
the literal meaning of utopia as no place, there are
oppositional voices to consider that stem from different perspectives and positions, which throw a
different and more positive light on these discussions. Utopianism is still a vital force in a number
of radical political arenas and has been over the last
few decades, especially within feminism and the
womens movement. One of the key challenges,
then, lies in how to reconceptualise the concept of
utopia and in particular the functions of utopian urbanism, so that they draw inspiration from such
movements and critical actions, rather than neglecting them through the claims of endings.
Utopian paths
To revive forms of utopian urbanism it is necessary
to rethink its definitions, which as stated above
237

DAVID PINDER

have been fixed traditionally around notions of an

ideal state or spatial form for a perfect future. It is
essential to reconceptualise utopian urbanism in
more open and process-oriented ways. In so doing,
it should be asserted that a central issue is desire,
the desire for a better way of being and living. Such
an analytic understanding of the utopian field, as
opposed to a categorising or descriptive one, owes
much, to the approach of, among others, the great
utopian Marxist Ernst Bloch, who explored so influentially how elements of utopianism run through
a whole range of everyday activities and cultural
forms in his vast study The Principle of Hope (1986
[195559]).
As expressions of desire, utopian visions may of
course function in ways inimitable to progressive
social change, being escapist or compensatory fantasies that distract from actions to bring about better futures. But they may also work as social and
political criticism, questioning aspects of the
present, bearing witness to and pressing home the
sense that something is missing from current conditions that should be the basis for struggles and demands. As the situationists once argued, the absence of imagination of their own time should be
understood by attaining the imagination of the absence. By that they meant a consciousness of
what is missing, forbidden and hidden, and yet
possible, in modern life (SI, 1981 [1962], pp. 81,
82, emphasis in original). The break with the here
and now that such utopianism enacts can create
space for challenging what is, for disrupting dominant assumptions about social and spatial organisation, and for imagining other possibilities and desires. It can thus be subversive, stimulating demands for action and political practice, exploring
how things might be different. Indeed, it can be a
process of exploring desire itself: learning about
desiring in ways that open beyond those that have
taken form under existing conditions. The latter
point relates to one of the major tensions that is
characteristic of utopian thought, whereby the imagination seeks to envisage that which by its very
nature cannot be defined in advance, given that the
effort to imagine has to take place within the unsatisfactory conditions and value systems that it would
attempt to move beyond.
It is the potentially disruptive qualities of utopianism that I want to emphasise here. There is a need
for forms of utopian urbanism that work to challenge, to estrange taken-for-granted assumptions
about the organisation of space and time, to interrupt dominant conceptions about linear temporal
238

progression or good spatial form in the effort to

open up unrealised possibilities in the present.
Thinking about utopian urbanism along these lines
does not answer any calls for bringing together oppositional currents and criticism in a singular form.
However, as stated above, I am wary of the danger
of longing for singular pictures of the future or for
supposedly stable and adequate representations of
a good society, those dreams of unity criticised
by Rosalyn Deutsche for denying their partial and
situated conditions of existence (Deutsche, 1996).
Instead, this approach allows a more open conception of utopianism that is transformative in intent
and that connects with other currents of critical
contemporary utopianism. These include earlier
traditions of Marxist utopianism, notably Henri
Lefebvres emphasis on what he called a philosophy of the possible (Lefebvre, 1995 [1962], p. 348,
emphasis in original); and strands of feminist utopianism in Europe and North American that have
been exploring utopianism in fluid, dynamic, oppositional terms since the 1970s. They are often explicitly partial, and they accept struggle and flux as
necessary and in need of acknowledgement, rather
than something to be hidden in the creation of a
supposedly conflict-free realm. Such transgressive utopianism is resistant to closure and is always in process. Rather than the classic, closed,
fixed form or blueprint to be realised, it becomes
an approach toward, a movement beyond set limits into the realm of the not-yet-set (Bammer,
1991, p. 7, emphasis in original; see also Sargisson,
2000).
Such an open approach is apparent in Leonie
Sandercocks proposals in the urban planning context for what she calls a Utopia in the becoming,
a vision of cosmopolis that is influenced by feminism as well as poststructuralist and postcolonial
theory. She envisages cosmopolis not as a state to
be realised but as a movement towards, with utopia
here conceived as a social project concerned with
living together in difference that is open to dialogue, change and contestation. This is in contrast
to utopias traditional inability to deal with questions of difference without collapsing them into the
same (Sandercock, 1998, p. 8). Within Sandercocks work there are traces of Iris Marion Youngs
influential earlier writings on social justice, and especially the latters normative ideal of an unoppressive city life as openness to unassimilated otherness. Young conceives of social justice as requiring the realization of a politics of difference and
looks towards an eroticized public vitality where
Geografiska Annaler 84 B (2002) 34

IN DEFENCE OF UTOPIAN URBANISM: IMAGINING CITIES AFTER THE END OF UTOPIA

differences are affirmed in openness (Young,

1990, pp. 227, 240, 241). In Youngs case it is no
starry-eyed optimism, for she recognizes that the
injustices and deep-rooted problems of cities in the
USA, where she is writing, mean that current urban
realities are in most respects far from this vision.
But she refers to the ideal in terms of the unrealized possibilities of the actual, and thus as something that can inspire critical reflection and political
action. While Youngs approach has been discussed
widely and can be criticised for its lack of attention
to the dynamics of urbanisation, and for its apparent promotion of a geography of indifferent toleration (Massey, 1996; cf. Sennett, 1994), what interests me most in this context is its avowedly utopian stance and its emphasis on the possible, along
with the significance of such an approach for stimulating important debates and struggles over justice
and what a more just urbanism might be.12
Harvey too engages with Youngs arguments en
route to developing his own arguments for a dialectical utopianism to counter claims about the
lack of alternatives. In calling for imagination and
political guts and a surge of revolutionary fervor
and revolutionary change to challenge the sclerosis in cities as well as in peoples minds, he distances himself from the traditional utopias of spatial
form, recognising their problematic role in seeking
to fix space and social order. But he maintains that
a stress on process allows utopianism to play a continuing role in radical thinking about cities, even after the widespread disillusionment with the authoritarianism of previous shining cities on a hill. As
he puts it: Emancipatory politics calls for a living
Utopianism of process as opposed to the dead Utopianism of spatialized urban form (Harvey, 1996,
p. 436). This is not meant to license the search for
a utopianism of pure process without reference to
material and spatial constructions that this could
be liberating in itself is another myth in his view
but rather to encourage an attentiveness to the dialectic between process and thing, between urbanization and cities, as a focus for pro-socialist
struggle. In more recent writings, he develops this
line of thinking as he recognises the exploratory
and open-ended qualities of some of the most creative utopian thinking in articulating alternative
spatio-temporal dynamics, including from within
feminism. At the same time, however, he makes
clear that, for utopianism to take spatial form and
not be perpetually deferred, choices have to be
made that involve particular materialisations at the
expense of others. Closure is necessary at some levGeografiska Annaler 84 B (2002) 34

el, he argues, if a romanticism of perpetually unfulfilled longing and desire is to be avoided. The
task is then to pull together a spatiotemporal utopianism a dialectical utopianism that is rooted
in our present possibilities at the same time as it
points towards different trajectories for human uneven geographical developments (Harvey, 2000,
pp. 187, 196).
Harvey raises critical questions that cannot be
resolved easily with the emphasis on openness and
process characteristic of the utopianism favoured
in this paper. These tensions are indeed never resolved fully in Harveys own account, as they are
not in many other recent writings on utopianism.
They certainly deserve fuller discussion than can
be provided here, but I would argue that such tensions and the debates they stimulate are in fact inherent components of a utopianism that is itself
critical, searching for alternatives and intent on
transformation. Recognition of that is important in
realising the potential role that a utopianism attentive to issues of imagination, desire and the possibilities unrealised within the present can play in urban studies. As I have stressed, contra much common opinion, a utopian perspective is not necessarily about projecting representations of a perfect
city, the institution of which is then sought as a
means of trying to overcome the difficulties and
complexities of the present. Nor does it need to involve closing down the social and spatial field by
proposing a fixed solution. Rather, it may be rethought in terms of addressing what is possible, and
of seeking out the prospects within present conditions for different and more just processes of urbanization. This also need not entail turning away
from pragmatic and policy agendas but may help to
develop a wider vision that can provide a context
for such debates, raising fundamental and often neglected questions about urbanity, processes of urbanization and what they might become. If a turn to
questions of utopian urbanism is to be critical rather than compensatory, and to avoid simply providing consoling figures to revive spirits wearied by
contemporary political cynicism, then its potentially disruptive and transgressive qualities need to be
emphasised. Such a spirit can return us to the provocative power of the field. It can help to raise urgent issues about the taken-for-granted world, and
to open up perspectives and actions on a vital question raised earlier: What sort of city for what sort
of society?

239

DAVID PINDER

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Guy Baeten and Ross Loveridge for organising the conference session within
which a version of this paper was presented, and the
participants at that session for their comments. I
would especially like to thank Guy Baeten for his
encouragement with the paper, an anonymous referee for raising important questions, and all those
who have discussed these issues with me over some
years.
Notes
1. See, for example, the catalogue edited by Schaer, Claeys
and Sargent, Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the
Western World (2000). This was from a touring exhibition
that visited the Bibliothque nationale de France in Paris,
and the New York Public Library in New York, in 2000 to
2001. Also indicative of renewed interest are publications
by Carey (1999) and Claeys and Sargent (1999).
2. The phrase is of course from Francis Fukuyama, The End of
History and the Last Man (1992). For counter-positions,
see Kumar (1993)
3. On the long-standing connections between socialism and
utopia, see Bauman, 1976.
4. For recent discussions of imagining cities more generally,
see Donald, 1999; and Westwood and Williams, 1997.
5. For a critical discussion of the utopianism of these movements, see Pinder, (forthcoming).
6. Among other influential strands of explicitly anti-utopian
postmodernist urbanism in the 1970s was that developed by
Leon Krier, as discussed by Kenneth Frampton in his
Place-form and cultural identity, (1988).
7. See also Ley, (1989, p. 53). The term postmodernism of
resistance is borrowed from Hal Foster who describes it as
a counter-practice not only to the official culture of modernism but also to the false normativity of a reactionary
postmodernism; see Foster, 1985, p. xii.
8. Wilson mistakenly attributes the plan to Le Corbusiers Radiant City, whereas the image she reproduces is based on a
drawing by Ludwig Hilberseimer.
9. Other commentators such as Edward Soja have gone further
in discussing the postmodern landscape of Southern California, arguing that such a de-definition and reconstitution
of theme park spaces on a regional basis in that area has
transformed the way that the degenerate utopia of Disneyland itself is seen. He states: There has been a second wave
that has carried hyperreality out of the localized enclosures
and tightly bounded rationality of the old theme parks and
into the geographies and biographies of everyday life, into
the very fabric and fabrication of exopolis [the city without]. Today the simulations of Disneyland seem almost
folkloric, crusty incunabula of a passing era (Soja, 1992, p.
101).
10. See also Harveys arguments about the utopianism of neoliberal presentations of the market (2000, pp. 175-179).
11. For an argument along these lines in relation to Guy Debords totalising critique of the spectacle in relation to geographies of the city, see Pinder, 2000.
12. For a recent development of Youngs position, see her book
Inclusion and Democracy (2000).

240

David Pinder, Department of Geography, Queen

Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK.
E-mail: D.Pinder@qmul.ac.uk
References
BAMMER, A. (1991): Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s. London: Routledge.
BANN, S. (1993): Introduction, in KUMAR, K. and BANN, S.
(eds): Utopias and the Millennium. London: Reaktion Books.
BAUMAN, Z. (1976): Socialism: The Active Utopia. London: Allen & Unwin.
BAUMAN, Z. (1987): Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-modernity, and Intellectuals. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
BENHABIB, S. (1986): Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of
the Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia
University Press.
BLAKELY, E. and SNYDER, M. (1997): Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States. Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution Press, and Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
BLETTER, R. H. (1993): Waiting for utopia, in COOPERHEWITT, S. Y. (ed.): The Edge of the Millennium: An International Critique of Architecture, Urban Planning, Product
and Communication Design. New York: Whitney Library of
Design, Watson Guptill Publications.
BLOCH, E. (1986) [195559]: The Principle of Hope, volumes
13, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight.
Oxford: Blackwell.
BOLTON, R. (1988): Architecture and cognac, in THACKARA,
J. (ed.): Design after Modernism: Beyond the Object. London:
Thames & Hudson.
BOYER, M. C. (1994): The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
BUCK-MORSS, S. (1995): The city as dreamworld and catastrophe, October, 73: 326.
CALVINO, I. (1979) [1972]: Invisible Cities, trans. W. Weaver,
London: Picador.
CAREY, J. (ed.) (1999): Faber Book of Utopias. London: Faber
and Faber.
CLAEYS, G. and SARGENT, L.T. (eds) (1999): The Utopias
Reader. New York: New York University Press.
COLEMAN, A. (1990): Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in
Planned Housing (2nd edn). London: Hilary Shipman.
DEAR, M. (1995): Prolegomena to a postmodern urbanism, in
HEALEY, P., CAMERON, S., DAVOUDI, S., GRAHAM, S.
and MADANI-POUR, A. (eds): Managing Cities: The New
Urban Context. Chichester: John Wiley.
DEAR, M. (2000): The Postmodern Urban Condition. Oxford:
Blackwell.
DEUTSCHE, R. (1996): Boys town, in DEUTSCHE, R.: Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
DONALD, J. (1999): Imagining the Modern City. London: Athlone Press.
ELLIN, N. (1995): Postmodern Urbanism. Oxford: Blackwell.
FAULENBACH, B. (1995): Utopia at the end of the twentieth
century: the current discussion in Germany, in FIEDLER, B.
(ed.): Social Utopias of the Twenties: Bauhaus, Kibbutz and
the Dream of the New Man. Germany: Mller and Busmann
Press.
FEST, J. (1991): Der zerstrte Traum. Vom ende des utopischen
Zeitalters. Berlin.
Geografiska Annaler 84 B (2002) 34

IN DEFENCE OF UTOPIAN URBANISM: IMAGINING CITIES AFTER THE END OF UTOPIA

FISHMAN, R (1982): Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century:
Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
FOSTER, H. (ed.) (1985): Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto
Press.
FRAMPTON, K. (1988): Place-form and cultural identity, in
THACKARA, J. (ed.): Design after Modernism: Beyond the
Object. London: Thames & Hudson.
FUKUYAMA, F. (1992): The End of History and the Last Man.
London: Hamish Hamilton.
GOLD, J.R. (1984): The death of the urban vision? Futures, 16:
372381.
GOLD, J.R. (1985): The city of the future and the future of the
city, in KING, R. (ed.): Geographical Futures. Sheffield: Geographical Association.
GOLDBERGER, P. (1977): Post-modernism: an introduction,
Architectural Design, 47(4): 256260.
GOLDBERGER, P. (1989): Beyond utopia: settling for a new realism, New York Times, 25 June, 2(1): 30.
HALL, P. (1984): Utopian thought: a framework for social, economic and physical planning, in ALEXANDER, P. and GILL,
R. (eds): Utopias. London: Duckworth.
HALL, P. (2002): Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of
Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (3rd
edn). Oxford: Blackwell.
HARVEY, D. (1989a): The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell.
HARVEY, D. (1989b): From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation of urban governance in late capitalism, Geografiska Annaler, 71B: 317.
HARVEY, D. (1993): Cities of dreams, Guardian, 15 October,
pp. 1819.
HARVEY, D. (1996): Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell.
HARVEY, D. (2000): Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
HUYSSEN, A. (1995): Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a
Culture of Amnesia. London: Routledge.
JACOBY, R. (1999): The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in
an Age of Apathy. New York: Basic Books.
JAMESON, F. (1991): Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism. London: Verso.
KUMAR, K. (1993): The end of socialism? The end of utopia?
The end of history?, in KUMAR, K. and BANN, S. (eds): Utopias and the Millennium. London: Reaktion Books.
LEFEBVRE, H. (1995) [1962]: Introduction to Modernity, trans.
J. Moore. London: Verso.
LEY, D. (1989): Modernism, post-modernism, and the struggle
for place, in AGNEW, J. and DUNCAN, J. (eds): The Power
of Place: Bringing Together the Geographical and Sociological Imaginations. London: Unwin Hyman.
LEY, D. and MILLS, C. (1993): Can there be a postmodernism
of resistance in the urban landscape?, in KNOX, P. (ed.): The
Restless Urban Landscape. Engelwood Cliffs, NT: Prentice
Hall.
LOWE, P., MURDOCH, J. and COX, G. (1995): A civilised retreat? Anti-urbanism, rurality and the making of an anglo-centric culture, in HEALEY, P., CAMERON, S., DAVOUDI, S.
GRAHAM, S. and MADANI-POUR, A. (eds): Managing
Cities: The New Urban Context. Chichester: Wiley.

Geografiska Annaler 84 B (2002) 34

MANUEL, F. E. and MANUEL, F. P. (1979): Utopian Thought

in the Western World. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
MARCUSE, P. (1995): Not chaos, but walls: postmodernism and
the partitioned city, in WATSON, S. and GIBSON, K. (eds):
Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Oxford: Blackwell.
MARIN, L. (1990) [1972]: Utopics: The Semiological Play of
Textual Spaces, trans. Robert A. Vollrath. Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press.
MASSEY, D. (1996): Some geographical thoughts on Flesh and
stone, City, 1(2): 164166.
MASSEY, D. (2000): Understanding cities, City, 4(1): 135144.
NEWMAN, O. (1973): Defensible Space: Crime Prevention
Through Urban Design. London: Architectural Press.
PINDER, D. (2000): Old Paris is no more: geographies of spectacle and anti-spectacle, Antipode, 32(4): 357386.
PINDER, D. (2001): Utopian transfiguration: the other spaces of
New Babylon, in BORDEN, I. and MCCREERY, S. (eds):
New Babylonians, Architectural Design, 71(3): 1519.
PINDER, D. (forthcoming): Visions of the City: Utopianism,
Power and Politics in Twentieth-century Urbanism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
RABAN, J. (1988): Soft City. London: Collins Harvill.
ROBINS, K. (1991): Prisoners of the city: whatever could a postmodern city be? New Formations, 15: 122.
ROBINS, K. (1996): Into the Image: Culture and Politics in the
Field of Vision. London: Routledge.
SANDERCOCK, L. (1998): Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for
Multicultural Cities. Chichester: John Wiley.
SARGISSON, L. (2000): Utopian Bodies and the Politics of
Transgression. London: Routledge.
SCHAER, R., CLAEYS, G. and SARGENT, L.T. (eds) (2000):
Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western
World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
SCHERPE, K. (1992): Modern and postmodern transformations
of the metropolitan narrative, trans. M. Cohen. New German
Critique, 55: 7185.
SENNETT, R. (1994): Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in
Western Civilisation. London: Faber and Faber.
SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL SI (1981) [1962]: Geopolitics of hibernation, in KNABB, K. (ed.): Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets.
SOJA, E.W. (1992): Inside exopolis: scenes from Orange County,
in SORKIN, M. (ed.): Variations on a Theme Park: The New
American City and the End of Public Space. New York: Noonday Press.
SOJA, E.W. (2000): Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities
and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell.
SORKIN, M. (1991): Exquisite Corpse: Writing on Buildings.
London: Verso.
WATSON, S. and GIBSON, K. (eds) (1995): Postmodern Cities
and Spaces. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
WESTWOOD, S. and WILLIAMS, J., (eds) (1997): Imagining
Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory. London: Routledge.
WILSON, E. (1991): The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. London: Virago Press.
YOUNG, I.M. (1990): Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
YOUNG, I.M. (2000): Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

241