The concept of the ideal city and the ideal society comes from the ancient Hellenic world. Plato in his Republic (circa 380 BCE) saw the ideal human organization as a concentrated expression of cosmic order. Plato and other classical philosophers believed that the blueprints of the perfect city-state had divine origin. However, it was humanity’s task to discover and put these divine principles into action. Thus, the notion of an ideal city and society, from its beginning, emphasized the primacy of human reason. Rational planning, regulation, and administration were essential to the good order.
Thomas More in Utopia (1516), Tommaso Campanella in City of the Sun (1602), and Francis Bacon in New Atlantis (1624) shared similar sensibilities about the major characteristics of the ideal city and the ideal society. They envisaged a self-sufficient entity whose successful construction depended on the extent of communal participation and rational reasoning. The ideal city-state was systematically and rigidly organized both in terms of its architectural layout and its social hierarchies. It featured strong public management and control to ensure order, equality, and fair distribution of resources to all of its citizens.
But where does the line between a fair public control and totalitarianism lie The rise of various oppressive authoritarian regimes of the 20th century vividly demonstrated that order was often transformed into dominance, equality into uniformity, and rigidity of organization into a total lack of freedom and disrespect for private activities. Pristine architectural grids and clear-cut social hierarchies were fast transformed into suffocating traps, once again blurring the boundaries of utopia and dystopia.
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias. Oscar Wilde
from “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” 1891
Utopias appear far more realizable than we had previously ever thought. And we now find ourselves faced with a question that is agonizing in a different way: How can we avoid their definitive realization?...Utopias are realizable. Life marches towards utopias. And perhaps a new age is already beginning, an age in which the intellectuals and the cultivated classes will dream of ways of avoiding utopias, and of returning to a society that is not utopian, that is less ‘perfect’ and more free. Nicholas Berdyaev
from “Democracy, Socialism and Theocracy, in The End of Time,” 1933
