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Utopian Cities

Utopias have long been interpreted as critical alternatives to the cities of early modern Europe. The publication in 1516 of Thomas More's Utopia ( the full Latin title reads: Libellus vera aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus de optimo reipeblicae statu deque nova Insula Utopia) brought the new literary genre into existence. The first translation was a German work published in 1524 by Claudius Catiuncula. Across the sixteenth century more translations of More's work appeared with the first English version coming into print in 1551 under the pen of Ralphe Robynson. By 1611 the word "utopia" makes it into an English dictionary. Despite its strong initial impact, the reception of More's work unfolded in stages. After More's Utopia, writers throughout Europe wrote similar novels about idealized communities which were nestled in the distant reaches beyond the known world. The reach of More's Utopia was quite long and over time the character of utopian writing expanded to include new formulations of an ideal community. Indeed, French writers took up the genre most intensely in the eighteenth century. Over eighty utopian works were written in French leading up to the Revolution. By then the genre had expanded beyond the More's humanist focus on virtue and public education to incorporate both rationalist science and geographical writings about the colonies. French utopian literature was broadly organized into three categories: imaginary republics, imaginary travel and moral adventures.

Implicit within all these novels was a critique of the political and moral organization of European cities. As many scholars have noted, a utopia presents an idealized community which is supposed to stand in sharp contrast to the reader's experience of city life. The utopia represents a possible alternative world. The fictional claim of most utopian novels is that the city depicted in the story actually does exist, for example on a distant island. Utopian literature uses its fictionality in a careful manner. It sets the idealized community in the world, but faraway, thus the utopia exists simultaneously with the everyday experiences of the reader.

Utopian literature was also allied with the expansive Renaissance discourse on city planning. As they described the internal structure and operation of their ideal cities, writers relied on the renewed scholarship on ancient Mediterranean cities begun by Alberti's treatise on architecture and extended by the Renaissance's many interpretations of one surviving Roman treatise on architecture and city planning written by Vitruvius. Architects, like novelists, composed imaginary cities which never left the paper on which they are drawn. We will connect utopian literature with the urbanism espoused by Italian architects who came after Alberti. The later, Baroque fantasies of Piranesi and Callot will be coupled with the Enlightenment ideals of Revolutionary architects such as Ledoux and Boullée. We will show how architectural theory intersected with the literature inspired by Thomas More's Utopia.