The second, established by the social reformer Robert Owen, failed because it couldn’t attract like-minded members with practical knowledge about how to farm or build. The first, founded by a Christian Perfectionist sect, failed after hostility from their neighbors and remoteness from like-minded groups forced them to relocate. New Harmony, a small town in southern Indiana, became the site of two utopian experiments in the 1800s. In Oneida, the attempts by John Humphrey Noyes to create a “free love” commune turned into the policing of sex and relationships, and charges of statutory rape. They were also cautionary tales about the consequences of dogmatic prescriptions for how to live and the hubris of individuals who think they alone have the ability to create utopia.
UTOPIAN SOCIETY FREE
But really, they were stories about about justice, liberation, free will, freedom of thought, happiness, wealth, agency, and ideology. The utopian stories I came across while researching Nice Try! were about people who tried to solve issues of affordable and equitable housing, to figure out how to build modern cities that worked better than what came before, and to create community for groups who were oppressed and ostracized by the mainstream. It’s all about the journey-more a direction and less a specific destination, to borrow from queer futurist José Esteban Muñoz. In this incrementality, there’s space for evolving ideals, and forward, progressive momentum is what we need. (The word, coined by writer Thomas Moore in 1516, is derived from Greek words meaning “no place.”) However, the utopian impulse-the desire to work toward an idealized place-can be productive. In a dark year, we looked for something brighter.Ī utopia, by definition, doesn’t exist. There’s even a Utopias beer, which might come in handy to wash down any utopia fatigue. When North Korea completed its new planned town of Samjiyon, state media billed it as a socialist utopia. Plans for a techno-utopian neighborhood in Toronto a floating utopian park in San Francisco David Byrne’s American Utopia production a New York Times deep dive into Italian industrialist Adriano Olivetti’s worker-focused utopia and the Ford Foundation’s Utopian Imagination exhibition. It seemed like everywhere I looked in 2019, there was a story about a utopia staring back at me. If you listened to Nice Try!, Curbed’s podcast on failed utopias, you might be familiar with the stories of some notable attempts to build a version of a perfect world-for better or worse. Or at least the idea of utopia, of people imagining an idealized place and trying to make it a reality. Here are three examples of utopian communities and experiments that used forward-thinking designs to help create their version of the ideal society.I spent the last year consumed by utopias. From neighborhoods planned in line with the garden city movement, to some mid-century modern design, to suburbs ( seriously), elements of utopian-inspired design have far outlasted most of the communities themselves. Born of a combination of frustrations with modern industrialized society and a hope for something better, these communities were attempts at implementing social reform-though most fell far short. And though the innovative social and political ideologies (and failures) of these communities are what we hear about most often, we’re most interested in the elements of their architecture and design that remain with us today. (Typically, some combination of leadership issues, problematic sex and relationship practices, and logistics.) Each of these groups, along with several others, were attempts at creating what people thought could be the perfect society, using communal living as a means of implementing religious or social values.
It’s easy to look back at the many failed American utopian communities that sprung up during the Transcendentalist movement of the 1840s-from the Oneida Community to Brook Farm to Fruitlands-and point out what went wrong.
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