Community, Space, Utopia
Ulrich Gehmann
Utopia is typically associated with community. Despite the existence of individual, “private” utopias, traditionally, a utopia does not exist for a single human being but for a group of people – a community. If we set aside the more sinister version of utopia, the so-called dystopia (which also has groups of humans as its focus) and look at the ‘positive’ utopia, the eu-topia, then the relation of utopia to community becomes evident. Bringing this issue to the fore, eu-topian scenarios are about the “good”, the “right”, or the “proper” community. These communities need proper spaces, both in terms of physical architecture and a non-physical social organization.
Frameworks
This in turn depends on assumptions – whether explicitly stated or not – about the form that such a “good” community takes, and this in turn rests on assumptions about the human being, about the conditio humana the utopian community in question relates to. Many of these assumptions (if not the vast majority of them) are rooted in a culture-specific heritage and are commonly considered under the umbrella term “cultural heritage”. According to the definition of heritage (in this case, the Cambridge Dictionary), heritage is made up of “features belonging to the culture of a particular society…which come from the past and are still important.1
Heritage is more than just tradition. Heritage has an active component to it; it is something that individuals always actively possess, and which influences their beliefs, assumptions and practices. Heritage can be deliberately discarded, or transformed. Nevertheless, it is ever-present, even in those cases where it is explicitly surrendered3 – such as in eu-topian ventures, where there is attempt to overcome ‘what is’.
Rooted in the myth of a second paradise, the search for utopia is an intrinsic part of our cultural heritage.4 As a space, the ou-topos or non-place is converted into an eu-topos, an ideal place for ideal communities to develop. The idea of community is very old. According to the anthropologist Leroi-Gourhan, ever since the dawn of humankind, spaces for human communities have had to fulfil three criteria: to create a technically efficient environment, to provide a social system or framework, and to create order in the surrounding universe; an order that originates from a fixed point, that of the community-space in question.5 No matter the appearance of this space, it embodies an anthropological need, a basic aspect of the conditio humana, especially after the onset of a sedentary lifestyle. Echoing the myth of a first paradise, Leroi-Gourha suggests it is the worldview of the sedentary opposed to that of the nomad: to conceive the world as an artificial cosmos, as a system of concentric rings which originates from an imagined centre, that of one’s homeland.
According to Aristotle, who makes reference to a cultural heritage already present in his lifetime, the human being is a zoon politikon, a communal animal that lives in the space most suited to it, the Polis. The notion of the Polis, the Greek “city state”, was rooted in the idea that man should actively participate (as a ‘political’ animal) in the affairs of his Polis.7 Interestingly, and importantly for utopias yet to come, the zoon politikon’s prime concern is the community, no matter where it lives. This is an idea that became an intrinsic part of our Western cultural heritage.
In its Greek conception, the community was a Polis in its entirety; it was not confined to the immediate urban area, but also included the neighbouring countryside. It drew on the principle of synoecism (derived from “oikos”, home), a harmonious unity and mutual dependence between town and country, whereby the member of a Polis, or “citizen” as it was later known, could live in both realms, even on a temporary basis.8
The Polis became an ideal from the Roman times onwards, where such a unity between nature and culture – which the Polis symbolizes, in mythological terms – was abandoned for the first time and superseded by a new concept: the clear distinction between town and country, with the city acting as the centre of civilization and the countryside as a rural hinterland. The Roman city, the urbs, was “the fons et origo of civilization, power and culture”, the source and origin of a truly civilized life. Moreover, the urbs was the representative of the orbis, the world’s space in its entirety – and not just any space.
Prolonging the worldview outlined by Leroi-Gourhan earlier, that Roman concept recurred to a much older and more deeply-layered cultural heritage: Us vs. the Others. Expressed according to the psychological terms of identification and separation, it could be considered almost an archetypal cultural heritage, which already existed long before the days of a sedentary lifestyle.
The distinction between ‘us’ and ‘the others’ might be an anthropological necessity, a necessary and intrinsic part of a conditio humana, for (a), obtaining and (b), retaining a group’s and thereby, one’s own individual identity. Being ‘us’ gives a sense of identity and strength, irrespective of the recent utopian attempt to achieve a unified and non-distinctive “world culture” in a world that meanwhile became a global village (McLuhan). Even in such a world, ‘others’ do exist: those who are not like us, do not believe in what we believe, do not live as we do, who are, in one word, less enlightened than we are, or who are different from us, and do not belong to our cultural and mental community.
This distinction, particularly when enhanced by a lack of closeness with the natural environment (as it was present in synoecism), results in a clear-cut mental separation between the inner world or an Inside – our city, our island, our group – and an outer world, an Outside which comprises the proverbial rest of the world. That ‘Outside’ is made up of the “others”, the entities and folks of this world which are not us: the areas outside our city walls, the barbarians, pagans, other enemy-city states, and so forth. In mythological terms: everything and everybody who is not us.
As mentioned, it requires a mythological, and not a rational procedure, to establish this distinction. Every fundamentalist approach and every utopian approach that aims for “better” human communities refer to this distinction, either implicitly or explicitly. In this regard, strains of a heritage specific to our own cultural realm, a so-called “Western civilization”, or more generally, an “Occident”, come into play. These revolve around our general attitude towards nature, a Christian heritage, and related to both, a cultural tendency of being competitive.
Nature and Culture
Nature or “the natural” can be considered a collective term or perhaps more appropriate, due to its mythology-grounded imagery, as an idea comprising many different perspectives. In broader terms, ‘nature’ or the ‘natural’ can be subdivided into two domains: the inner nature of something or someone (“it is in his nature to act like this”), and an outer nature, the entirety of the natural world, comprising the domain of natural entities in an outside world, such as plants, animals, ecosystems, wind patterns, as well as our own physis as human beings.
According to the Greek conception of nature at the beginning of what was called later on “the Occident”, nature was physis, something that “grew out of itself”, out of its own powers. Returning to even older roots of Indo-Aryan origin, nature was associated with the growth of a plant.10 Physis is prote genesis, the primordial and primal process of unfolding in this world, and its counterforces are technique, techne, and nomos, the man-made law11. According to this conception, technique denotes what nature is not able to create, since nature is not capable of doing what technique does. Technique is artificial; it is an art, producing artifacts, and art is not nature. 12And, even more important: it belongs to human nature to have Techne and Nomos; just because of that, the human being differs from a ‘natural world’.
No other culture has made such a sharp and decisive distinction between nature and culture as the Occident. An entire cosmogenesis is built upon this distinction, also in terms of its modern outcomes. Compared to other cultures, we are confronted with a “completely exotic cosmology.” 14
This basic idea, together with its associated mindset, also relates to utopias as ideal spaces for communities. The primary aim of utopias was to influence the inner nature of human beings, in order to improve them in some way. For example, to make them more human, less aggressive, more peaceful, and more community-oriented. In essence: to make them more positively human than humans are at present, in their current state. That meant that a “human nature as it is” could not be accepted; it had to be influenced – to be made better, whatever ‘better’ was imagined to be, in a certain context. There was therefore a need to design spaces in which such communities could live, first and foremost as architectures of organization, using management techniques to socially engineer ‘better’ human beings, and to cultivate them towards their better state, in line with the framework of “the law”, the Nomos of the utopian state in question. 15
This cultivation-process of “human nature” is deeply unnatural. Moreover, by following a Christian heritage, it aims to achieve redemption from human history as it was, and from the human behaviours associated with this history. The utopian aim of being released from “earthly” conditions that existed in the respective present was evident from the very beginning of the utopian movement right up to recent developments in post-humanism. This process of utopian cultivation is comparable to the amelioration of plants that might otherwise grow wild.
In terms of worldview, it relates to our cultural heritage.Culture or cultura is associated with agricultura, agriculture, the cultivation of space for human use. Cultura stems from colere, to take care of something – for example, ploughing a field – and by that, to transform it and to take it into possession. Therefore, colere does not only mean to take care of but also to inhabit a space that has been created. Such a space is the new Inside, a cultivated space that belongs to us, as opposed to an untreated, non-cultivated Outside. Thus, the cultivated space becomes a liveable place. Habitare, which means to inhabit and live in a place, relates to habere, “to have” in the sense of possessing something. Through colere, the habitat can become a designed place, a place of culture. 16
Christian Heritage
Utopias have been influenced by a Christian heritage in two ways: firstly, by a specific conception of history, which is aligned with the idea of redemption towards a better state of existence; and secondly, by a pronounced separation of an Inside, and an Outside.
According to the Christian conception of history humankind progressed from an original, primordial paradise, the Garden of Eden – the point Alpha of human history – towards an end point, the point Omega of the world as we know it (and hence, of humans as we know them). Point Omega will come for certain, no matter what happens on the long journey from Alpha to Omega.18 Omega is the Day of Judgement and after this point in time, two reigns or ‘worlds’ will reign: namely Hell, the world of the damned, and Heaven, the second and final paradise, the world of the redeemed.
Taking a closer look at the image of the human underlying this conception of history, the specific conditio humana it is based upon, it becomes clear that human history failed right from the start, in the first paradise, due to the Original Sin. If the first humans had not eaten from the tree of knowledge, they could have lived in an eternal state of harmony with themselves, and with nature – similar to the “happy primitives” who were discovered in their paradises by European explorers and later, by Western ethnologists searching for traces of a primordial state of Being. According to Nietzsche, after that sin, the rest of history became deeply unnatural, a kind of “punishment existence” far removed from the original, and primordial, human desire to lead a “happy, idle, innocent and immortal” life; and it will remain so, until point Omega is reached. 19
Looking at the myth of humankind from this biblical perspective, things got worse from that moment onwards. The nomad Abel was killed by the sedentary Kain, founder of the first city, generating an evolutionary level of civilization, from which there was no way back towards a natural state21 – despite all ‘nature’-oriented utopias that came afterwards, again and again. The city is civilization, and civilization depends on technology. The technician is the true master of civilization, says Leroi-Gourhan. Kain’s descendant was Tubalkain, who practiced the art of metallurgy, and, according to the symbolical terms of mythology, was capable of completely transforming natural materials into a non-natural version of the artifact. 22
Ever since its creation, the city has embodied the difference per se in the human environment, states Vercelloni: and there were no differences between the real city and the myth of the city, he says, with the real city nourishing the myth.23 An entirely new system of human life was formed; the city became a true second nature in terms of habitualization, an artificial environment for the zoon politikon that acted as the ‘natural’ frame of daily life.
Utopia, Redemption, and the Ideal City
If we refrain from utopias that intend a return to nature, but instead attempt to go back to an evolutionary level that existed before the emergence of cities and civilization, we can see that the idea of utopia and the idea of the ideal city are closely related. They are both about individuals living in a community, and in the case of ‘civilized’ communities, refer to an urban architectural setting that supports this idea.
The very notion of civilization relates to the context of the city as an artificial nature: civis, the Roman citizen, belonged to a civitas, a formal community of such citizens, with its own territory and administration. It was an affiliation of humans who were able to live according to their own laws and procedures, in their own space.25 Civitas describes “a social body of citizens bound by law. Yet in that dry definition lies something more poetic: the dream that we are greater than the sum of our constituent parts. How can we, as citizens and as collective individuals, be more than we are alone?” 26
Taking up this Roman conception, for St. Augustine, the final aim of human history was to become a citizen of the Civitas Dei, the ideal, final city of Heavenly Jerusalem at the end of all days. Then, and only then, would the individual subject be truly liberated. Only in this sanctuary, our true and real selves would be revealed. According to Richard Sennett, this burden of the Christian conception of history still weighs upon the present. 27 When translated into the modern, secularized context of the present day, this means: once humans are expelled from their original, ‘natural’ and ‘paradisiacal’ state, they cannot be left unchanged, to become truly human once again. Rather, in accordance with Christian heritage, humans will have to be transformed.
However, this is not the only relevant aspect. There is an additional idea of great significance: the relationship between utopia, the ideal city, and transformation, which suggests that liberation is ultimately artificial. The first paradise was an artifact made by God, just like the second paradise: the final, ideal city of a Heavenly Jerusalem. 28 Whilst the first paradise has been irreversibly lost, hope for the second paradise remains, or for a utopia that could be brought to Earth in various architectural forms. For it is architecture, not nature, that liberates the human being. 29 Architecture, in the broadest terms, is an artifact or a mode of organization destined to liberate its inhabitants, the people who live by its terms and conditions. Expressed in terms of the nature/culture- divide that is so prominent in our Western cultural sphere, it is culture, not nature, that liberates humans. The green city, for instance, is not a natural state that has been brought back into the city, but a nature that has been tamed, domesticated and adapted to city architectures.
This accords with the Christian conception of history, which puts progress at the fore: a “better” state of Being can only be realised in the future, and can only be achieved within the framework of a world yet to come. In line with this Christian perspective, and including its secularized modifications, humans can only become more human, more liberated, and less restricted by material or psycho-mental confinements in the future. In the past and present, humans are just what they are: imperfect, bounded by restrictions, beings that fall short of their full potential.
Nature, Culture, and Utopia
To what extent can architecture – if understood as a planned order or organization30 – influence communal living? To what extent can architecture shape human behavior, influence the inner nature of human beings, and therefore support the emergence of better communities? These questions have long been debated, and it is of little wonder that two opposing viewpoints have arisen: that architecture can influence human behaviour, or it cannot.
On the latter viewpoint, Isidor from Seville made a very good point: when describing civitas, he asserted that it is not stones but people that make up a community. 31 If one considers modern and recent cities as places of civitas, Isidor’s saying seems to gain even greater meaning: because this type of ‘city’ is no longer a true city. In his work The Architecture of the City, architect Aldo Rossi states that the European city is no longer the house of the living, but of the dead. The city’s original function has been lost, its history exhausted. Now, the city only serves as a “melancholic place for collective memory”, as a kind of open-air museum, a musée sentimental. 32
How should we view communities and their living spaces from this perspective? Where can true communities live when confronted with such contexts, contexts where urban architecture no longer matters? If a community needs a place, and not just a space, in which to unfold and prosper, where do such places for communal living exist? And what about utopia – hope for a better place? Utopia means the non-place; the majority of people live in non-places, in spatial arrangements and agglomerations that are not suited to a truly “human” way of life. Even if Isidor is right, where are the places in which communities can develop, and sustain their ways of life? Everywhere, or nowhere?
These questions lead to the other viewpoint, addressed above: architecture undoubtedly influences human behavior; and it exercises its influence intentionally, in order to improve a current way of living. This holds true for the city and for urban design; the human being as a “political” creature – the zoon politikon – is in need of a city suited to its nature. Urban design must therefore consider human behavior.34 So, which types of cities are designed for which kinds of human beings? What about the underlying assumptions about the conditio humana? Moreover, what happens when coherent urban design is lacking, as is the case with the majority of modern and recent cities? What happens when our attentiveness to the overall gestalt of a city is lost and the city evolves into a mere agglomeration of buildings and people?
For communities that deserve this title, concomitant architectures have to be constructed, both in terms of the invisible architecture of a social organization and in terms of the visible architecture of built physical space. This holds particularly true for ‘ideal’, utopian communities, as they rely on the presence of ‘ideal’ spaces that are suited to them and which serve human nature, by fostering traits that are considered ‘positive’. Any new artificial nature that belongs to the domains of culture, that of the ideal organization and the physically built ideal space – a place to belong – shall bring out the ‘inner nature’ of human beings. In a utopian venture, the aim (and hope) is that nature and culture will unite.
Utopia and the Ideal Space
To achieve a closer connection between community and space, the community must look beyond ‘space’, and search for the true meaning of ‘place’. Communities need places, not just (abstract) spaces to lead a truly communal life. They relate to the anthropological ‘place’ described by Marc Augé, which is associated with identity, belonging, and history. 36
The distinction between space and place is rooted in a much older difference, which developed as part of our cultural heritage. The notion of place resembles the Aristotelian topos, denoting “the space of the concrete situation, of sensual experience and immediateness”, whereas space refers to the Roman spatium, “a different type of space; it is the geometrical space, the space of architecture”. Spatium is an abstract, metric space, the space of metric proportions, of geometry, not the space of the “concrete living environment”. Topos, by contrast, is a local space; “it knows environments, neighbourhoods, concrete positional relationships, but not abstract, metrical distances. The metric space on the other hand, the spatium, is defined by distances – therefore, it is able to define locations and their positions…A place is an environment where you are. Whereas metric proportions are a way to conceive something.” 37 It is therefore of little wonder that spatium is associated with architecture; and that modernity developed according to an idea inherent to this concept, namely the design of abstract geometries – such as in modern cities.
If communities are preconditioned to need true living places, then they need topos, rather than spatium. But how should they construct these “anthropological” places? In order to become a place of history and identity, a topos has to develop “organically” over time; it cannot be constructed de novo. The problem is that utopian or ‘ideal’ places for ‘ideal’ societies are not just constructed de novo; moreover, by their very conception, they intend to overcome the past and what existed before, or was developed throughout the course of history. So, how can a utopian place convey identity? In terms of its architecture, and irrespective of its historical forerunners, the utopian place is a-historical: it is a new place for an ‘ideal’ community or society, yet to be realised, and is therefore located in the future.
More importantly, this new place will not grow organically out of an existing place, or out of what has already accumulated throughout history; it must be made anew. Each ideal state marks, by intention at least, the end of history. The anthropology of the ideal place is designed, not grown – from Plato to Joaquim de Fiore to Mao Tse Tung & followers. In that sense, each ideal state can be considered an ideal prison. An ideal is perfect, and requires no further development; it is an end-state and therefore has to be kept as it is, as an end state – the seed of dictatorship.
Although history has seen the rise and fall of many ideal states, no ideal state can be replaced with a ‘better’ one of the same kind, but only by another of a different kind. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be ideal. One becomes keenly aware of the problem resulting from this: any utopia has the tendency to be intolerant.
This idea does not have to be confined to the preferred place for a conditio humana, the city; utopias do not only have to be located in cities. In previous cases where they were, corresponding ideal cities tended to be rigidly geometric, and often oriented towards cosmic metaphors, such as circles, radiants, and strictly axial geometries. These constructions go back to Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s City of God, the Heavenly Jerusalem and the second, final paradise at the end of all days. 40
A convincing example of this utopian space is the first explicit utopia designed by Thomas More in the Renaissance. More writes that all 54 cities on his utopian island were constructed in the same manner, including the houses. Since this society – made up of ideal communities – was egalitarian, private property did not exist, and as a result, “people [were] seriously interested only in the interest of the community at large.” 42 One step further, and his city would have become completely standardized. After More and at the end of the Renaissance period, Simon Stevin constructed a standardized city in 1594, a perfect grid with standardized houses. His argument was: “Why does every house have to look different? And why do they all have to be full of decorations? People are alike, therefore we can have houses that are alike, constructed from the same building materials.”
Long before Modernity, the idea of using more than just prefabricated materials and refraining from ornamentation came into play; this was the precursor to modern purism, so to speak. An idea that was initiated by Plato, and later expressed in Thomas More’s work, now came to a natural end: formatization on a grand scale had become the basic characteristic of the traditional utopian space. Since all humans are made equal, so too should their architectures: both the invisible architectures of social organization as well as the visible architectures of the physically built space.
We can see a more recent example of a traditional, utopian space in China, where there is evidence of an additional aspect related to the “classical”, formatted utopia: confluence in behaviour. A historical pattern becomes evident, epitomized in cities and houses of 18th Century Brazil, to which the Portuguese governor commented: “…one of the things to which the most cultivated nations are giving their attention at the present time is the symmetry and harmony of the buildings of new cities and towns. This is not only of practical benefit, but also gives pleasure, in that such good order expresses the lawfulness and culture of the inhabitants.” 43
Clearly, “good order” does not just refer to architecture, but also to behavior, and to behavior that abides by laws. This is a cultural issue of modeling the world, at least the relevant parts – which then become the utopian space – in its “right version” (Nelson Goodman). Hippodamus of Miletus, the supposed founder of the most rational form of structuring space – the grid – said in the 5th Century B.C. that the standardized, gridded city is the best substrate for a perfect democracy. 44
An Outlook
Whether an ideal city or not, all utopian spaces share the common characteristic of being an island; either explicitly, such as those that followed the format of Plato’s Atlantis and Thomas More’s utopia in the Renaissance, or implicitly, such as those spaces separated from the ‘normal’ spaces of a ‘normal’ world. Returning to the Inside/Outside-division addressed earlier, utopian space is something radically different to the rest of the world. It is the ‘Inside’, which stays relevant to the ideal community searching for utopia, that stands in stark contrast to the outside world, which is far from an ideal state of living or being. Indeed, the outside world is a normal world in all its otherness, no matter how extended the utopian space, the place where ideal communities are living, is intended to be.
Or is another kind of utopia imaginable, one that is not just pre-fixed and unchangeable, but is constantly evolving? A utopia that has a history, a sense of development over time, instead of being an ideal space carved in stone forever? Is it imaginable, or even possible, that the inhabitants of the utopian place in question are able – or allowed – to mold their own utopia over time, to adapt it, and to change it?
Moreover: is it possible that we are allowing ourselves to develop a completely different conception of a ‘utopian’ state of being? To free ourselves from that inherited Platonic and Cartesian tradition and long for the perfect end state? To conceptualize the very idea and notion of utopia anew? To conceive and to conceptualize our utopian island of “otherness” in new, more flexible ways?
1 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/heritage
2 Art Deco-motif, Durlach/Germany. Photo U. Gehmann
3 Willer, Stefan et al. (2013): Erbe. Übertragungskonzepte zwischen Natur und Kultur: 8
4 See Ideal Spaces in https://www.idealspaces.org/magazines/ideal-spaces/
5 Leroi-Gourhan, Andre (1984): Hand und Wort. Die Evolution von Technik, Sprache und Kunst: 397f. And 404 in the following, to the concentric world view.
6 Garden of Eden. Pilgrims Church, Steinhausen/Germany. Photo U. Gehmann
7 To the idea of the human being as a zoon politikon and to that beings’ context: Aureli, Pier-Vittorio (2011): The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture: 3-5.
8 Vance, James E. Jr. (1990): The Continuing City: Urban Morphology in Western Civilization: 56f.; Kostof, Spiro (2007): The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History: 59, 36f. To the Roman conception see Lefebvre, Henri (2007): The Production of Space: 244
9 Wall painting in the Cafe Athenaion Politeia, Athens. Photo U. Gehmann. Cf. with fig. 7
10Gloy, Karen (1995): Die Geschichte des wissenschaftlichen Denkens. Das Verständnis der Natur.: Vol.I, 26; Descola, Philippe (2013): Jenseits von Natur und Kultur: 107f.; Knobloch, Eberhard (1981): Das Naturverständnis der Antike: 13f.
11 To the concept of nomos see Knobloch (op. cit.): 19f.; Mittelstraß,Jürgen (1981): Das Wirken der Natur. Materialien zur Geschichte des Naturbegriffs: 37; Aureli (op. cit.): 4f.
12 Knobloch (op. cit.): 19f; Mittelstraß (op. cit.), 44 (techne/physis), 53
13 Graffito on a transformer station, Bretten/Germany. Photo U. Gehmann
14 Descola (op. cit.): 107
15 To the distinction between nomos, the man-made law, and physis see Knobloch (op. cit.): 19f.
16 Fisch, Jörg (1992): Zivilisation, Kultur. In: Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Vol. 7, 678-774: 683-87; Heinichen, Friedrich A. (1903): Lateinisch-Deutsches Schulwörterbuch: 207, 367-69; Lefebvre (op. cit.): 259
17 Vista of Iuliomagus, near today’s Schleitheim/Switzerland. Museum Iuliomagus (photo U. Gehmann)
18 A related, interesting conception is from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1961): Le Groupe Zoologique Humain. He tried to incorporate findings from modern science into such a conception of history.
19 Nietzsche, Friedrich (ed. of 1996): Der Wille zur Macht. Versuch einer Umwertung aller Werte: 205
20 Wiblingen/Germany, ceiling fresco (F. M. Kuen) from the cloister’s library. Photo U. Gehmann
21 This myth is also narrated in a scientific form, for instance in Gowdy, John M.: Evolution of Economics, in: Wuketits, Franz M./Antweiler, Christoph, eds. (2004): Handbook of Evolution, Vol. I: The Evolution of Human Societies and Cultures, 253-97.
22 Leroi-Gourhan (op. cit.): 226f. Therefore, art and technique are linked, originally: they create artifacts.
23 Vercelloni, Virgilio (1994): Atlante storico dell’ idea europea della citta ideale: plate 1
24 Schaffhausen/Switzerland: Graffito on the wall of a police station. Photo U. Gehmann. Cf. with fig. 3
25 Heinichen (op. cit.): 144f.; Fisch (op. cit.): 682, 687; to territory see Ohler, Norbert (2002): Die Kathedrale. Religion, Politik, Architektur. Eine Kulturgeschichte: 139
26 Leon, Ana Maria: Civitas. Space of Co-Liberation. In: Axel, Nick et al. (2018): Dimensions of Citizenship. Architecture and Belonging from the Body to the Cosmos, 60-78: 60
27 Sennett, Richard (1994): Civitas. Die Großstadt und die Kultur des Unterschieds: 37
28 To the artificial nature of both these paradises, see McClung, William A. (1983, and 2020): The Architecture of Paradise: Survivals of Eden and Jerusalem.
29 To this, see the article at https://www.idealspaces.org/magazines/ideal-spaces/ to both paradises, including their secularized “quasi-mythification”.
30 Opposed to the so-called spontaneous or self-organizing orders of natural systems.
31 Isidor quoted in Kostof (op. cit.): 37
32 Aldo Rossi, L’architettura della città (1966), in Lampugnani, Vittorio M. (2011): Die Stadt im 20. Jahrhundert. Visionen, Entwürfe, Gebautes, Vol. II: 815f.
33 View on Athens from the Acropolis. Photo U. Gehmann
34 Kostof (op. cit.): 37, to the zoon politikon and the city; and 9, to urban design.
35 Theatre stage of the Arcosanti complex by Paolo Soleri, Arizona/USA. Photo U. Gehmann
36 To the characteristics of such a place, cf. Ideal Spaces, in this magazine.
37 Böhme, Gernot (2013): Architektur und Atmosphäre: 15f.
38 London, Business District. Photo U. Gehmann
39 Central housing unit of the ideal community of Guise (19th century); Northern France. Photo U. Gehmann
40 Kostof (op. cit.): 162f.
41 Construction of Motopia, Ideal Spaces exhibition 2016, https://idealspaces2016venicebiennale.lowend.se/worlds#Motopia
42 More cited in Feuerstein, Günther (2008): Urban Fiction. Strolling through Ideal Cities from Antiquity to the Present Day: 46f., 49. And 49f., to Simon Stevin in the following.
43 Quoted in Kostof (op. cit.): 258. To the “right version” of a world see Goodman, Nelson (1988): Ways of Worldmaking: 4
44 Quoted from Aristoteles’ Politieia, in Benevolo, Leonardo (2000): Die Geschichte der Stadt: 143