Embodied Utopias

Gender, Social Change and the Modern Metropolis

Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders, Rebecca Zorach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415248136
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134537563
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Utopia has become a dirty word in recent scholarship on modernism, architecture, urban planning and gender studies. Many utopian designs now appear impractical, manifesting an arrogant disregard for the lived experiences of the ordinary inhabitants who make daily use of global public and private spaces. The essays in Embodied Utopias argue that the gendered body is the crux of the hopes and disappointments of modern urban and suburban utopias of the Americas, Europe and Asia. They reassess utopian projects - masculinist, feminist, colonialist, progressive - of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they survey the dystopian landscapes of the present; and they gesture at the potential for an embodied approach to the urban future, to the changing spaces of cities and virtual landscapes.

Part I

Chapter 1: Is There a Built Form for Non-Patriarchal Utopias?

Thomas A. Markus

SOME PRELIMINARY COMMENTS

Whether the word is understood as ‘eu-topia’, ‘the happy place’, or as ‘u-topia’, the ‘non-place’ – two meanings which are often conflated since the happy place exists nowhere – what is the point of utopia? Raymond Williams's definition of it as ‘the education of desire’ is useful: a way of exploring who we are and what we long for. By articulating ‘the not yet’ it helps us to act in the actual world, defining objectives, giving direction to struggle and resistance, setting a political agenda and opening the door to creative dialogue.

T.S. Eliot is much more sceptical; he sees it as an attempt to evade moral responsibility, to become invulnerable in a cradle of certainty:

They constantly try to escape

From the darkness outside and within

By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.¹

No definition can obscure utopia's double effect: oppressive, alienating elements coexist with liberating, humanizing ones. These visions are divided by the most fragile boundary from their inverse – dystopia, especially when they become blueprints for social or material action. Many utopian projects have crossed the boundary even when they were on paper. They required, or assumed the availability of, major resources of land, capital, materials, labour, military power or patronage. By definition these are controlled by those with economic and political power, and their projects are ‘power over’ rather than ‘power to’. One is oppressive, one liberating. Historically such ‘power over’ has been men's, and it is therefore natural to call oppressive projects patriarchal. But not all utopian projects are like this. There have been hundreds of modest experiments, in which groups have struggled to build model societies and settlements. Sometimes these have been movements of resistance to political or military power, as in the case of the women's protest camps at Greenham Common in England, discussed below, where the driving force was opposition to nuclear weapons. Elsewhere, as in the kibbutzim of Israel, the Rappites and Zoarites of America, or The Woman's Commonwealth of Texas, they integrated various forms of religious belief (often resisting mainstream religious institutions), social reform (including critiques of the family and gender inequalities), and radical economic relations (based on the community of goods, and new modes of production). Yet in other instances the impetus was ecology – a counter-cultural movement which opposed nuclear energy, the waste created by urban economies and conspicuous consumption – which led to the setting up, worldwide, of countless small communes. Whilst these experiments are initially small, some eventually grow to be large in terms of size and the number of settlements. They may contain the same intricate mix of alienation and liberation as their grand cousins, but in these it is easier to find the seeds for educating desire. They are usually provisional fragments, either because their creators come from a position of resistance and cannot command major personal or institutional resources, or because their ideas inherently call for fragile solutions.

There are some key questions. If the asymmetrical power relation between men and women were not a historical fact could men have designed differently; and could they do so in a future where this asymmetry no longer holds? Indeed would there be such a thing as a ‘male’ or a ‘female’ utopia? Or is there something intrinsic to male utopias, whatever men's social or political position, and, equally, do women's utopias contain features which men could never create? Do patriarchal designs also have non-alienating and non-oppressive features? Are the less grand visions liberating and, if so, are they gendered? Do women's and feminist designs have alienating and oppressive features? To produce answers would involve going to the heart of the feminist debate about essentialism and difference, and a discussion of utopia might not be the most fruitful way of doing that. But a close look at utopian designs provides some pointers.

If it is the case that both men's and women's, patriarchal and feminist, utopias contain fragments of both liberation and oppression, and if some feminist utopias are a form of resistance to oppressive patriarchal ones, then a simple gender classification of utopias is not very useful. Rather it is more useful to look at the specific types of resistance. It can take three forms. First, theoretical, intellectual argument. Second, the creation of counter-propositions, alternative visions. And third, action, where built territory has been resisted or reclaimed. Women have played a prominent part in all three.

The critical framework set out here is constructed around some salient utopian features, within which a small sample – imagined, designed or built – can be discussed.

BODIES IN SPACE

The ‘embodiment’ in this book's title plays a dual role.

• First, embodiment suggests the materialization, in the concrete designs for buildings, towns and cities, of the abstract visions of utopian literature. These built forms structure space, and that space is intended for inhabitation by people.
• Second, following from the above, embodiment refers to the location of bodies – human and hence gendered bodies – in these utopian spaces.

So built forms and human bodies are both implicated. It is therefore impossible to think about designed or built utopias without thinking about bodies in space.

An inescapable property of human bodies, except those in cyberspace (an increasingly important ‘non-place’ discussed below), is that they have to be somewhere, in some real space which is articulated by material objects – built and natural forms. When people label and use space they inhabit it (that is what inhabitation means) – they give it function. A function is, then, inscribed into space by both language and use.

So the built objects have these three properties of form, space and function which are the key discourses of architecture.

All built space inevitably structures social relationships, by creating ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’, categories of ‘inhabitants’, ‘visitors’, and ‘strangers’, and it separates those with power from those who lack power. In other words all space is political. Just as utopian texts can educate political desire, so too utopian designs can educate design practice. To see how, we first need to understand how buildings carry meanings, in terms of these three discourses.

THE DISCOURSE AND DISCOURSES OF ARCHITECTURE

Whilst Louis Sullivan's dictum ‘Form follows function’² is widely rejected, the fragmentation of architectural discourse is even more complete than that rejection implies. There are no inherent connections between form, function and space. To answer the question ‘What does this building mean?’, we need to find answers with respect to all its properties in a common discourse. The discourse which contains language, values and everything we do (i.e. social practice) is the discourse of social relations. It is there that we should expect to find answers to the questions about meaning. These relations are of two kinds. First, the structures of power – just or oppressive – which are enshrined in law and contracts, and enforced through sanctions or by coercion. Second, the structures of bonds – such as solidarity, friendship and love. All real human space produces and reproduces these two. As utopian vision is concerned with the creation of power relations that are just and rich bond relations, so its architecture (as indeed any architecture) can only be understood in terms of power and bonds.

When function, form and space are mapped into that common field of social relations the meanings may be familiarly convergent, or divergent, in a shocking scatter of paradox and contradiction (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1

Function, form and space converging to a point or to a ‘cloud’ in the field of social relations (SR).

Form is the most familiar discourse. Almost everything said or written about architecture is about its forms: criticism and scholarship (drawing on conventional art-historical methods), practice, and debate in the media. Formal discourse is about physiognomy, or the plan. To analyse utopian designs we need evidence about style and plan. The surprise is that stylistically the utopian schemes most radical in function are often clothed in the most conventional forms, so that at first, or even second glance, their architecture proclaims nothing startling. Robert Owen's early nineteenth-century ‘New Institution for the Formation of Character’ at New Lanark in Scotland has the simple, classical features of a minor late-Georgian country house. Jean-Baptiste André Godin's ‘Social Palace’ or Familistère at Guise in France, based on Charles Fourier's ideas, for all its radical commitment to liberated relations in industrial production, an ‘amorous code’, and ‘the extension of the privileges of women [as] the fundamental cause of all social progress’, is clad in traditional brick with stepped gables. Sometimes this gap between content and form is reversed – radical forms and conservative content. In Archigram's Walking City, Soleri's ecological Arcology city for 170,000 inhabitants, or Stanley Tigerman's Instant City, all from the 1960s, the startling technological forms of vast pure geometries clothe the crudest of social programmes. Such gigantism is alive and well today – as in Mexico's ‘symbol of utopia’ used for Latin America's most extensive real estate project (Figure 1.2).

It is in film that forms have been most strikingly depicted – but mostly of urban dystopia. Fritz Lang's 1926 Metropolis was the first dark, monumental and dangerous city on film. Here the workers in the subterranean depths were represented as identical, black-suited automata in a city apparently inspired by Manhattan; this image summed up the widely-held early twentieth-century fear that cities were becoming dehumanizing. H.G. Wells's 1936 Things to Come, a cinematic version of Le Corbusier's Radiant City, offered a more idealized shining white city, mechanized and scientifically controlled. The dark city of Ridley Scott's 1982 Blade Runner – Los Angeles in the year 2019 – is a far cry from Le Corbusier and H. G. Wells. Teddy Jamieson (1999: 14) quotes from Scott Bukat-man's critique:

The polyglot architecture of Blade Runner's future urbanism challenges the dream of a rational, centrally planned city. The city is dispersed, boundless, heterogeneous … the white cities of Things to Come and the 1893 World's Fair and the Futurama of the 1939 Fair have been replaced by a city of darkness, night, chaos and delirium.

Figure 1.2

The Arcos Bosques high rise office block in Mexico, ‘Latin America's most extensive real estate project … a new land of opportunities for foreign investors – a “symbol of Utopia”. By permission of World Architecture, website: http://www.worldarchitecture.uk

Anton Furst's Gotham City tried to represent the Hell of Tim Burton's Batman (1989). The Crow (1994) and Dark City (1998) have continued these frightening images of dark, out-of-control cities.

Women designers have sometimes broken the mould, using innovative but unalienating forms for radical functional and production programmes. Alice Constance Austin's plan for Llano del Rio (1916) was to create a radical socialist feminist city for 10,000 people to resist domestic drudgery – ‘the maiming or fatal, spiritual or intellectual oppression . . . [of] each feminine personality’ (Hayden 1976: 301). Her kitchenless houses, organized around courtyards, were constructed using the latest technology. The forms grew out of function, and a concrete panel construction well in advance of avant-garde European industrialized building techniques. Nevertheless the geometry of her city plan, with its radiating avenues, circle of public buildings and centre-to-edge hierarchy of land use, is hard to distinguish from age-old totalizing utopian geometries.

Such forms, whether of built projects or of unbuilt proposals, and whether those of dominant conservatism or of radical avant-garde, are rooted in licit construction – sanctioned by law or sponsored by recognized institutions. But the forms of resistance, such as graffiti, or of illicit construction such as squatter housing made of unconventional materials, should also been seen as expressing a vision, a counter-utopia. The analysis of form always raises questions about agency: ‘whose forms?’, ‘whose construction?’. The discourse of space, whilst a familiar everyday experience, is barely articulated in architectural texts. The spatial discourse has nothing to do with geometry, and everything with topology – with next-ness. Different spatial structures (syntaxes) create, make possible, or limit, entirely different social relations. A set of descriptive and analytical techniques for this space syntax have been developed by Bill Hillier and his colleagues at University College London.³

Using methods of spatial analysis one discovers that some building plans are deep, some shallow. Some have branching, tree-like structures, some have rings. These differences signify quite different relations between users, degrees of freedom in the choice of routes, opportunities for chance encounters, solidarities and possibilities for control and surveillance. In other words spatial maps also map social relations – though perhaps in unexpected ways.

Public buildings such as banks, churches or theatres have their ‘inhabitants’ (management, ministers of religion or directors) who control the building's programme, deep within space and ‘visitors’ (customers, congregations or audiences) in shallow space near the surface. They interface at the counter, communion rail or proscenium arch. It is argued that institutional buildings are reversed; the inhabitants near the surface and the visitors (hospital patients, prisoners or school children) deep. Instead of increasing depth signifying increasing power, in the reversed building the most controlled people are in the deepest space. This idea is fruitful for thinking about utopian space.

Not all social relations are embedded in specific local spaces. Hillier and Hanson (1984) propose that Emile Durkheim's organic solidarity is spatial, whilst his mechanical solidarity is trans-spatial (Durkheim 1964 [1893]). Thus members of a family, employees of an enterprise or users of a health centre, related to each other by differences in status, gender and work roles (= organic solidarity), produce their social relations in the local space of the home, the office, the factory or the clinic. Space becomes an instrument in the definition of family membership, ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Embodied Utopias
• THE ARCHITEXT SERIES
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Embodied Utopia: Introduction
• PART I
• PART II: CIVILIZATION/DEGENERATION: DESIRE AND REPULSION IN THE MODERN CITY
• PART III: AT HOME IN PUBLIC
• PART IV: ESPRIT DE CORPS AND ESPRIT DÉCOR: DOMESTICITY, COMMUNITY AND CREATIVE AUTONOMY IN THE BUILDING OF FEMALE PUBLIC IDENTITY
• PART V: EMBODYING URBAN DESIGN
• PART VI: HAUNTING THE CITY
• PART VII
• Bibliography
• Index