Urban Utopias — What Prevents Their Realization?

Abstract

Beginning in the Twenties, but with particular intensity between 1958 and 1968, architects attempted to picture for us the ideal city of the future. The last decade of these Utopias came to an end in 1968, a year of highlights and disappointments in many fields. Strangely enough, not one of the many proposed Utopias, which are no longer Utopian by any means from the technical point of view, has been realized, and what has in fact been carried into effect, even though extravagant in appearance, does not embody the essential properties and innovations of the Utopias envisaged. Even at the 1967 World Expo, which provided an opportunity to design the extraordinary, the choice fell on “Habitat ‘67” by Moshe Safdie, a project which was avant-garde in the conventional sense but in no way Utopian. The decade of the Utopias thus leaves us with the conclusion that the failure to realize the designs of the Utopian architects is due to sociological, not technical reasons; it is not feasibility they lack but the possibility of implementing them by the decision-making process.