“Running parallel to the utopian literary genre is that of the ideal city. In the former, the social arrangement appears to be of primary concern and the urban of secondary; in the latter, this is usually reversed.”
– Ruth Eaton
The history of designing the idealistic, utopian city is a long and turbulent one. While the idea of a utopia usually stays in the theoretical, the idea of the perfect city sits on the precipice between fiction and reality, and has often crossed that border. While the utopia seeks to redesign society in its entirety, the ideal city seeks to fix the flaws of the old cities by fitting in with the world that has changed since the last city was constructed. Artists saw the waning social structures and physical structures of the past, and recognized an opportunity to demonstrate their newfound individuality with the designing of cities of the future.
One of the main factors of these cities’ “idealness” was their perceived perfection. They were often designed to be massive grids, or radiating out in a circle from a central point. Perfection was in the aesthetic. What wasn’t in perfection, though, was anything else. What made these cities better than the old ones? The example that the text gives is da Vinci’s (valid) concern of disorderliness and disease prevalent in the old cities, which the designs of the new cities seem to solve via orderliness and less compact conditions. Other than that, there seems to be no obvious benefit.
Another problem with the idea of the ideal city lies in the very problem that caused these cities to be dreamed of in the first place – human change. Artists designed the cities of the future in response to the changing political, social and cultural climate of the era. By the time you’ve finished constructing the idealized city, a lot will have changed already. One generation down might have ideals similar to those of the designing generation, but once we get to two or three generations down the culture will have completely shifted. Take the United State’s car culture, for instance. With the advent of car-centric cities in the 1920s and 30s, an entire generation was raised with a certain type of designed city as the norm. Skip ahead a few generations, and people realize that walkable, human based cities are also a viable option, and some people prefer those. If anti-car-centric city sentiment ever grew to a level at which it would be recognized by politicians, what could even be done? The entire country of the United States is built on the idea of car-centric infrastructure. It would require an inconceivable amount of money to even begin to dig up the deeply ingrained city designs of the past.
It is this which is the fatal flaw of the ideal city – its immutability. If you champion an idea as the ideal, the best, an idea which is the most suitable for humanity at the moment, people will want to adopt that idea. That is what the ideal city’s artist wants as well – Thomas More had fifty-four of his cities. Since the idea is popular, it will be widespread, and something which is widespread tends to be resistant to change. The artist of the ideal city has unfortunately become the victim of the very thing that they wanted to account for – human change and progress.