On the fourth of July 1996, the Walt Disney Company dedicated its last creation, the city of Celebration, its first true attempt at planning a whole city built to house 20.000 people. Celebration was ...designed according to the standards of the neotraditional town-planning movement and thus reproduces the Main Street section of the theme parks. Its attempt to function as a refuge-city is suggested through references to an idealized past. This article aims to show the influences used during the design stage and the promotion of the city, as well as the reactions it sparked in the American press : Celebration was in fact presented to the public as a prime alternative to decaying fifties suburbs of the Sun Belt, a utopia for the nineteen-nineties.
With its religiosity and aspirations of becoming a world-class city, Nashik is oscillating between its past and future. As a city of pilgrimage and vineyards, Nashik is experimenting by re-imaging ...itself to attract global capital. This article analyzes the politics of the urban utopias envisaging different futures for Nashik by examining the ambitious state-led Godavari Riverfront Development projects. Extending the idea of "worlding," I analyze the state-sanctioned utopian imaginations and how they become sites that expose alternative futures. I take the Kumbh Mela (largest Hindu congregation) of 2015 as a critical event that makes multiple urban utopian imaginings immediately recognizable in Nashik. Further, using the political ecology framework, I unpack the contestations between these utopian visions and how locals embody state-sanctioned urban utopias, organize resistance, and pose alternative visions of Nashik's future. By doing so, I argue, there is a need to investigate local peculiarities when assessing the dynamic worlding processes.
The constant migratory phenomena and the displacement of part of the world’s population from the countryside to the city are bringing great part of the agricultural workforce in the big cities, ...changing their work sector from agriculture to industry. In this context, theorists and promoters of urban farming have seen in this industry a powerful tool to find spaces suitable for cultivation within the urban fabric, while promoting a new green development of the city. Resuming the fascination of mega-structures proposed in the second half of the twentieth century, in the gap between utopia and dystopia, this essay investigates models and solutions for the integration of agricultural production systems within above-ground architectures, designed to meet the demand for new living spaces in future ultra-populated cities, as a possible response to the soil impoverishment that made it difficult to implement traditional farming systems in and around urban areas.
In constantly expanding its fields of application, sustainable development is becoming the basic approach to planning and governing the twenty-first century city. This article examines sustainable ...urban development policies through the lens of utopian thinking and indicates the opposing scholarly interpretations of modern utopianism. On the one hand, this is approached as dreaming and fantasizing about the future; on the other, it is approached as well-calculated planning activities. More specifically, this article explores how the urban community in a post-socialist, post-industrial city faces the implementation of the challenge of a twenty-first-century sustainable development project. Using the example of the city of Katowice in southern Poland, the article examines three discourses of sustainable urban utopianism. It is first seen as strategic planning for a pursued better future; second, it is seen as an image of the city of the future; and, third, it is seen as a difficult-to-achieve vision for the city of the future in light of specific local barriers to development. Apart from Katowice’s successes in transforming its traditional industrial profile—based on coal mining—this study also draws attention to the successful construction of a new image for economic changes, urban design, and sustainable development, which has been confirmed by numerous recognitions at the national and international scale.
This paper discusses the impact of using the computer game SimCity™4 in student assignments to develop city and strategic plans. It is conceptualized around Lobo's (2005) critique of SimCity™ as ...'toying with the city'. Two University of Queensland urban planning classes (one undergraduate, the other postgraduate) were asked to use SimCity™4 to build simulated cities. One class was about building historical urban utopias; the other was about strategic metropolitan planning. The paper evaluates the effectiveness of this use of SimCity™4 to develop students' plan-making skills, and reports on students' assessment of whether and how the game's assumptions forced modifications away from preferred planning outcomes. The paper concludes that, whilst SimCity™4 is indeed based on 'toying with the city', city planning practice is increasingly using computer-based simulations (some based on GIS) to toy with future city scenarios to play with and understand the likely outcomes of planning policies. The convergence of the two ideas gives strength to the idea of using computer games like SimCity™4 in planning education.
Creative social strategies in Barcelona. The Walden-7 case.The metropolis of Barcelona is widely recognised as an innovating milieu. This article focuses on the conditions and opportunities the city ...offers for social innovation, that is to say the development of creative strategies pointing at new solutions for social problems left without adequate answers. We focus our study upon the development of residential urban space and we take a special interest in the Walden-7 case, located at Sant Just Desvern, Metropolitan Area of Barcelona - four decades of experience frequently referred to as an “accomplished urban utopia”. The Walden-7 is a very early intervention of urban regeneration where the design of collective space, the conception of new neighbourhood relationships and the inside organisation of the apartments have left striking marks of social innovation. This article highlights therole played by adversity as a socially creative impulse alongside the temporality and the course of social innovations.
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