Abstract
From More’s Utopia onwards, utopian literature has projected plans, schemes, and visions of cities intended to embody and deliver a good life. This chapter addresses the significance of such utopian perspectives on urbanism and processes of urbanization, both historically and in the current environment. Recent times have often been depicted as ones “after utopia” and the dark horizons of contemporary urbanization might seem to be better captured by dystopian literature and film. Yet in some of their contemporary critical forms, dystopias can themselves be seen as underpinned by renewed utopian impulses oriented towards radical change. This chapter concentrates on utopian perspectives on urban questions by considering significant interplays between literature, planning visions, and urban theory, including through reference to major figures such as Edward Bellamy and David Harvey. Arguing that current global challenges of urbanization and climate crisis require what Mike Davis has termed “a vast stage for the imagination”, the chapter asserts the potential value of revisiting and re-evaluating utopian urban visions of the past, so as to seek supposedly “impossible” paths beyond the constraints of dominant “realism”.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ameel, Lieven. 2016. Cities utopian, dystopia, and apocalyptic. In The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City, ed. Jeremy Tambling, 785–800. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Baccolini, Raffaella, and Tom Moylan, eds. 2003. Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. London: Routledge.
Baeten, Guy. 2002. Hypochondriac geographies of the city and the new urban dystopia. City 6 (1): 103–115.
Beaumont, Matthew. 2009. Utopia Ltd: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870–1900. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
———. 2012. The Spectre of Utopia: Utopia and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle. Bern: Peter Lang.
Bellamy, Edward. (1888) 2007. Looking Backward 2000–1887. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brenner, Neil, ed. 2014. Implosion/Explosion: Towards a Theory of Planetary Urbanisation. Berlin: Jovis.
Burrows, Roger. 1997. Cyberpunk as social theory: William Gibson and the sociological imagination. In Imagining Cities, ed. Sallie Westwood, 235–247. London: Routledge.
Datta, Ayona. 2015. New urban utopias of postcolonial India: “Entrepreneurial urbanization” in Dholera smart city, Gujarat. Dialogues in Human Geography 5 (1): 3–22.
Davis, Mike. 1998. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. London: Verso.
———. 2018. Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory. London: Verso.
Frye, Northrop. 1965. Varieties of literary utopias. Daedalus 94 (2): 323–347.
Gibson, William. 1994. Virtual Light. New York: Bantam Books.
Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hatherley, Owen. 2008. Militant Modernism. Winchester: Zero Books.
Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso.
Latham, Rob. 2009. The urban question in new wave SF. In Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould and China Miéville, 178–195. London: Pluto.
Le Corbusier. (1923) 1946. Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells. London: Architectural Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. (1970) 2003. The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bonanno. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Marin, Louis. (1972) 1984. Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, trans. Robert Vollrath. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Milner, Andrew. 2004. Darker cities: Urban dystopia and science fiction cinema. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7 (3): 59–79.
More, Thomas. (1516) 2016. Utopia. London: Verso.
Morris, William. 1889. Looking backward. Commonweal 5 (180): 194–195.
Mumford, Lewis. 1965. Utopia, the city and the machine. Daedalus 94 (2): 271–292.
Pinder, David. 2005. Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
———. 2015. Reconstituting the possible: Lefebvre, utopia and the urban question. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39 (1): 28–45.
Prakash, Gyan. 2010. Introduction: Imaging the modern city, darkly. In Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, ed. Gyan Prakash, 1–14. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Salmela, Markku, Lieven Ameel, and Jason Finch, eds. 2021. Literatures of Urban Possibility. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sargisson, Lucy. 2012. Fool’s Gold? Utopianism in the Twenty-First Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Smith, Neil. 2001. New geographies, old ontologies. Radical Philosophy 106: 21–30.
Timms, Edward. 1985. Introduction: Unreal city – theme and variations. In Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art, ed. Edward Timms and David Kelley, 1–12. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Troiani, Igea. 2013. Eco-topia: “Living with nature” in Edilia, Iceland. Journal of Architectural Education 67 (1): 96–105.
Urry, John. 2016. What is the Future? Cambridge: Polity.
Walker, Nathaniel. 2020. Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Watson, Joseph. 2017. Topographies of the future: Urban and suburban visions in Edward Bellamy’s utopian fiction. Planning Perspectives 32 (4): 639–649.
Wegner, Philip. 2007. Here or nowhere: Utopia, modernity, and totality. In Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming, ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, 113–129. Bern: Peter Lang.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pinder, D. (2022). Urbanism. In: Marks, P., Wagner-Lawlor, J.A., Vieira, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88654-7_38
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88654-7_38
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-88653-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-88654-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)