George

Rowland
(he/him) Utopia and Planning
Centre for
Sustainable
Planning and
Environments

Monday 5
February
Who am I?
• ESRC funded PhD student in
the Centre for Sustainable
Planning and Environments.
• Background in Social and
Political sciences, before
coming to do a Masters, then
the PhD at UWE.
What am I doing now?
• Research interest in Low Impact Development, unconventional
rural development,
• Low Impact Development defined by Fairlie (2009) as ”development
that through its sustainable value, either enhances or does not
significantly diminish environmental quality”.
• Seeking to answer the question: Why is it so difficult for Low Impact
Developments to gain planning permission?
• Involves investigating how planning limits radical alternatives, how
it perpetuates a certain image of the countryside and how it isn’t
responsive to changing social relations.
Who knows why this crosswalk is significant?
This is why…
We should use any means
necessary to achieve utopia, even
if these means are authoritarian or
repressive in the short term.

Who are the ‘we’ in this situation?

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
“At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does
not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all.
Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two,
and then leaves home… They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the
darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a
place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I
cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem
to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
• There is a conflict between the public utopia in Omelas and the
private exploitation of the child which sustains this utopia.
• How would those walking away from Omelas answer the discussion
question?
What is Utopia?
Romantic Utopianism
• Utopia as idealised
vision of life; of
plentiful resources and
comfort.
• Often promoting a
romantic vision of life
and utopia.
• Criticised as
unachievable and
lacking a basis in
reality.
• Useful for prompting
thought and
theorising.
Blueprint Utopia
• Presents a utopian end
point and a set means to
achieve that end point.

• Criticisms of being
deterministic and
sometimes authoritarian.

• Often applies scientific

and rationalist principles.
Sometimes for better,
sometimes for worse.
Anti-Utopianism
• Reaction against
Utopian ideas that can
articulate in differing
ways.
• Criticisms as being
deterministic,
unrealistic or
inevitably resulting in
failure or dystopia.
• Is this just a protection
of the status quo?
There is no Alternative
• Quote related to
Margaret Thatcher and
neoliberalism
• Revivified during the
austerity period
particularly.
• No alternative to a
particular form of
capitalism
• Alternativlos – Lack of
alternative stemming
from an Angela Merkel
description of the
Greek Debt crisis.
No Alternative?
• “…it is easier to imagine the end of the
world than it is to imagine the end of
capitalism. That slogan captures
precisely what I mean by 'capitalist
realism': the widespread sense that not
only is capitalism the only viable
political and economic system, but also
that it is now impossible even to
imagine a coherent alternative to it.
Once, dystopian films and novels were
exercises in such acts of imagination -
the disasters they depicted acting as
narrative pretext for the emergence of
different ways of living. Not so in
Children of Men. The world that it
projects seems more like an
extrapolation or exacerbation of ours
than an alternative to it.” (Capitalist
Realism – Mark Fisher, 2009, p2)
Should we dispose of utopia as a concept?
• Is planning necessarily
utopian?
• While reformist and
gradual, planning
always has some vision
of the future.
• How useful are the
visions of utopia
presented for
planning?
• Utopia as a ‘non-
planned ideal’
Utopia as a process
• Argues that as there is
no end point to utopia
it should be seen as a
process of creation.
• Specifically argues that
the utopia is vested in
co-creation and co-
production in the
process rather than
any set vision or
image.
• Often interested in
direct democracy and
constitutionalising.
Utopia as a Process – Coin Street
• Coin Street Community
Builders grew out of
resistance to
commercial
development.
• Local led community
housing, with
specialists brought on
board when necessary.
• Now run through
housing co-operatives,
tenants maintain and
manage collectively
through the co-
operative
Prefiguration
• The deliberate
experimentation with
desired future social
relations in the here-
and-now.
• Building the new world
in the shell of the old
• Emphasises putting
morals into practice a
strong relation
between theory and
action.
Means and End Alignment
• In prefigurative
thought a strong
emphasis is put on the
link between ends and
means.
• You can’t build a
directly democratic
society without using
direct democracy from
the outset.
• The ends are
embodied by the
means.
Prefiguration and Utopia
• Concrete utopia as a
utopia grounded in
everyday practices.
• Sees the struggle for
alternative forms of
social reproduction as
a means of creating a
positive vision of what
could be.
• The struggles prefigure
the alternative forms
of social reproduction
that they aim to
create.
What does this mean for Planning?
• A significant element
will be a prefigurative
critique of planning.
• We are all aware that
planning has noble
aims, but also that
these often aren’t
achieved.
• Prefiguration offers an
explanatory critique of
these failures to
achieve goals.
What does this mean for Planning?
• Allows us to articulate
a vision of what
utopian planning could
be.
• Planning can be part of
a Utopia as a process.
• Planning less as an
institution and
bureaucracy and more
of a means of
communal research
into social problems
and their solution
Examples – Low Impact Development
• “Development that
through its low
environmental impact,
either enhances or
does not significantly
diminish
environmental
quality.”
• Generally, this means
living off-grid, using
local materials and
aiming to be self
sufficient.
• Also often involves
communal ownership
models.
Examples – Low Impact Development
• Rejection of carbon
intensive lifestyles and
a desire to address
climate change.
• Solution to climate
change is collective
and social.
• Use communal
ownership, collective
decision-making and
radical sustainability as
ways of prefiguring
desired future society.
Examples – Doshi & de Carlo
Bristolian Examples - Estates
Bristolian Examples – Community Housing
• Bristol
Community Land
Trust
• Ecomotive
• Ashley Vale
Action Group
A Final Quote
• ”All of the examples of social empowerment
over the economy which we have explored
focus on partial aspects of the overall
relationship between social power and the
economy. Taken together they might
constitute a system-level transformation,
but each example on its own only
constitutes movements along a particular
pathway of social empowerment. This is in
keeping with the general framework for
envisioning real utopias proposed earlier:
rather than attempting to specify the
design for the final destination, the
strategy is to examine specific mechanisms
which move in the right direction.”
Envisioning Real Utopias – Erik Olin Wright
Any questions…?
George.Rowland@uwe.ac.uk