Working paper: jh-2021-03-31-a (https://josephho33.blogspot.com/2021/03/working-paper-jh-2021-03-31-an-agile.html)
An agile literature
review on utopian city for city image analysis
JOSEPH KIM-KEUNG HO
Independent Trainer
Hong Kong, China
Dated: March 31, 2021
Abstract: Literature
review, done in an agile way, is helpful to part-time undergraduate students
who typically have a busy pace of life. Mastery of the agile literature review skill
helps these students to do course assignments and final-year dissertation projects.
This article presents an account on an agile literature review exercise on Utopian
City (for city image analysis in the subject of Geographical Imagination). It contributes
some academic and pedagogical value to the study of literature review, Utopian City,
Research Methods and intellectual learning, especially to part-time students studying
the subject of Geographical Imagination.
Key words: agile
literature review exercise, intellectual learning, literature review, utopian
city.
Introduction
Literature
review is an important academic skill for university students doing course
assignments and final-year dissertation. It is a prime intellectual learning
skill to be mastered from studying in an academic degree programme.
Nevertheless, due to the busy life rhythm typical of part-time degree students,
there is a need for literature review practice that is agile, i.e., nimble,
incremental and responsive. An agile literature review method, however, is in
contrast with the conventional approach which favors a vigorous, comprehensive
and systematic stance. Being a lecturer to some part-time undergraduate degree
programmes, e.g., Housing Studies and Business Management, in Hong Kong, this
writer is interested in developing and promoting agile literature review. In
this article, the writer presents an account of an agile literature review on
Utopian City (for city image analysis in the subject of Geographical
Imagination). This work is relevant to the writer’s teaching and research
interest in Geographical Imagination, Research Methods and intellectual
learning. The aim of this article is straightforward, which is to illustrate
the agile literature review method. This illustration is presented in the next
section, followed by a brief “concluding comments” section.
The agile
literature review exercise on Utopian City
The agile literature
review exercise was done by the writer in March 30-31, 2021, involving
literature search and the review of the academic articles gathered. It made use
of Google Scholar and two U.K. university e-libraries to source academic
articles on Utopian City. Albeit a nimble exercise, some engaging intellectual
learning effort was required to perform the literature review exercise. The
findings are presented in Table 1.
Table 1: A set of gathered academic ideas
related to Utopian City, grouped in three categories
|
Categories |
Academic
ideas of Utopian City |
|
Category
1: the nature of Utopian Thinking [idea 1.1] |
“Utopian thinking: the capacity
to imagine a future that departs significantly from what we know to be a
general condition in the present. … In the peculiar form of dystopias,
utopian thinking may alert us to certain tendencies in the present, which, if
allowed to continue unchecked and carried to a logical extreme, would result
in a world we would find abhorrent. (Friedmann, 2000, p. 462)” (Macleod and Ward, 2002). |
|
Category
1: the nature of Utopian Thinking [idea 1.2] |
“The
term “utopia” is a Greek neologism coined by Thomas More in 1516 to describe the ideal society of his novel Utopia.
The word comes from the Greek ού, meaning “not”, and τόπος, meaning “place”,
indicating that more was using the concept as allegory and did not consider
such an ideal place to be realistically possible. Later, however, more used
the term “Eutopia” meaning “good place” in reference to “Utopia” (Eaton,
2001; Merlin & Choay, 1988). In
general, More’s Utopia was a radically
original urban and social proposal that opposed the ideology of its time
period. ….. private property held no
meaning at all in utopia, and all citizens were equal in the eyes of More
(Hawkes, 1985). Furthermore, they could access all facilities offered by
their society (Desbazeille, 2008)” (Ganjavie. 2012). |
|
Category
1: the nature of Utopian Thinking [idea 1.3] |
“In the most general sense, utopia is a fictive representation of an ideal
social structure. This social structure is uniquely urban; as Frye
observes, utopia “is primarily a vision of the orderly city and of a city
dominated society” (p. 324). Utopian myths thus maintain a critical distance
between themselves and the city they originate in. The function of this
critical distance is diagnostic; the utopia exposes the pathologies that infect the society that it examines
by presenting a rationalized, healthy city” (Nichols, 2008). |
|
Category
2: the ingredient concepts of Utopian City [idea 2.1] |
“Utopian
thinking has two moments that are
inextricably connected: critique
and constructive vision. The critique is of certain aspects of our
present condition: injustices, oppression, ecological devastation. It is
precisely an enumeration of these ‘evils’, however, that implies a code of
moral values that is being violated. ….. The moral outrage over an injustice
implies that we have a sense, however inarticulate, of justice. …. … differences about social justice are
ultimately political, not philosophical arguments. In any event, they are
unavoidable, because if injustice is to be corrected (or, for that matter,
any other ‘evil’), we will need the concrete imagination of utopian thinking
to propose steps that would bring us closer to a world we would consider
‘just’. It is this concrete vision
— the second moment of utopian thinking — which Tan Le was calling for to
give her a sense of a meaningful deployment of her own powers in the public
sphere. Such visionings are always debatable, both in their own terms and
when measured against alternative proposals” (Friedmann, 2000). |
|
Category
2: the ingredient concepts of Utopian City [idea 2.2] |
“The good
city requires a committed form of political practice which I call
transformative. It was Hannah Arendt who formed my concept of action or
political praxis (she used the terms interchangeably). She writes: ‘To act,
in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin . . . to set
something into motion. . . It is in the nature of beginning that something
new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened
before. The character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all
beginnings and in all origins’ (Arendt, 1958: 177–8). To act, in other words,
is to set something new into the world. And this requires an actor, or rather
a number of such, because political
action of the transformative kind always involves a collective entity or
group” (Friedmann, 2000). |
|
Category
2: the ingredient concepts of Utopian City [idea 2.3] |
“If they are not to be seen as arbitrary, principles of the good city must be
drawn from somewhere, they must be logically connected to some foundational
value. … I would formulate this
principle as follows: • Every human being has the right, by nature, to the full development of
their innate intellectual, physical and spiritual potentials in the context
of wider communities. I call this the right to human flourishing, and regard it as the most
fundamental of human Rights” (Friedmann,
2000). |
|
Category
2: the ingredient concepts of Utopian City [idea 2.4] |
“The positive side of utopian thinking, that
which prompted Henri Lefebvre to ask ‘Who [of progressive thinkers] is not a
utopian today?’ (1996, p. 151), is its rejection of fatalistic or, as in the
case of too many urban planners, politicians and architects, opportunistic
acceptance of a status quo. Proactively, utopian thinking is implicated in the
formulation of radical goals. As David Harvey puts it: ‘[W]ithout a
vision of utopia there is no way to define that port to which we might want
to sail’ (2000, p. 189)” (Cunningham,
2010). |
|
Category
2: the ingredient concepts of Utopian City [idea 2.5] |
“… utopianism has often been marginalized within mainstream futures
studies. SCI [‘Smart city imaginaries’] are a recent expression of the
long association between utopian thought and urban imaginaries (Cowley, 2016;
Cugurullo, 2018b; Vanolo, 2016) drawing inevitable comparisons with, for
example, the urban utopias of Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier and Frank
Lloyd-Wright that shaped the planning of twentieth century cities (Datta,
2015; Fishman, 1982). However, descriptions of the smart city as ‘utopian’
typically invoke pejorative meanings of the term (Cugurullo, 2013, 2017;
Greenfield, 2013; Söderström, Paasche, & Klauser, 2014; Wiig, 2015). This
can connote a hopeless fantasy
that will never be realized (e.g. Watson, 2014) or an ideological one that
obscures the real interests shaping urban development (e.g. Wiig, 2015) and
their actual implications for urban spaces (Cugurullo, 2017)” (Binaa, Inchb
and Pereira, 2020). |
|
Category
2: the ingredient concepts of Utopian City [idea 2.6] |
“Cities are neither organisms nor machines. They
are flesh and stone intertwined. They are “built thought.” They are the containers of dreams and desires, hopes and fears. They are an
assemblage of active historical agents making daily choices of how to live
well. They are an assemblage of communities: communities of interest as well
as communities of place; invisible communities of the dead as well as of the
unborn. Cities are the repositories of memories, as well as memory’s texts:
their layered surfaces, their coats of painted stucco, their wraps of
concrete register the force of these currents both as wear and tear and as
narrative” (Sandercock, 2002). |
|
Category
2: the ingredient concepts of Utopian City [idea 2.7] |
“In the Renaissance,
many theorists worked on projects of ideal cities. Many of these projects
were utopian, and their most common feature was a fully geometrical spatial form. The grid in the ideal city
could have a radial shape of a star (like Sforzinda), but its shape could
also be orthogonal, and inscribed in the polygon. The designs of the Roman
architect Vitruvius were discovered in 1415 and had a strong influence on the
models of the ideal cities mentioned above. Referring to eight principal
winds, Vitruvius claimed that the ideal city should have an octagonal shape.
As for the basic rules determining the planning of the city, they included firmitas (durability), utilitas (utility), and venustas (beauty)” (SŁodczyk, 2016). |
|
Category
2: the ingredient concepts of Utopian City [idea 2.8] |
“The nineteenth-century social utopias
played a significant role in the history of utopian urban planning. Social
unrest and increasing chaos in the development of industrial centers at the
beginning of the nineteenth century provided impetus for the continuation of
the search for urban forms that would satisfy all the basic needs of the
working class. After the industrial revolution, it was a spatial form that helped designers to strike a balance between
effectiveness of production and acceptable conditions for a peaceful
existence in environmental and sanitary terms. Spatial organization of
the city became one of the most important theoretical elements of the new
social model that appeared in the nineteenth century. Planners created an
entirely new conceptual matrix, which expressed disapproval towards the
growing gap between the rich and the poor who were mostly the working class
endangered by poverty and dreadful living conditions produced by rapid
industrialization” ((SŁodczyk, 2016). |
|
Category
2: the ingredient concepts of Utopian City [idea 2.9] |
“We know that utopian discourse, unlike ideology,
has revolutionary potential and as
such is interesting from the perspective
of social change, and particularly urban social change. Utopia related to
the specific area of urban planning is based on the fact that the origins of
the discipline were profoundly influenced by the ideal city and utopian
discourse” (Solinís, 2006). |
|
Category
2: the ingredient concepts of Utopian City [idea 2.10] |
“… utopian planners used provocative and subversive urban designs
which mostly took on dystopian forms
in order to educate citizens (Baeten, 2002; Pinder, 2002). Utopian
planners who apply these disruptive methods generate citizen debate and
inspire a different way of thinking about certain societal problems in the
city (Harvey, 2000; Pinder, 2002). In this context, proposing such models is
a means of resistance against the status quo mode of urban development.
Through the dystopian mode of presentations and the use of provocative
methods, these imaginative models function as a form of resistance in order
to question the structure of the world and propose a new way of being” (Ganjavie, 2015). |
|
Category
3: the application considerations of Utopian City [idea 3.1] |
“In his rallying call to envision
possibilities for a more equitable, just and ecologically sustainable urban
future, David Harvey contends that most of what passes for city planning has been inspired by utopian modes of thought (Harvey,
2000). This is evident in projects ranging from Plato’s Republic to those of
the twentieth century that owe much of their character to pioneering thinkers
such as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier” (Macleod and Ward, 2002). |
|
Category
3: the application considerations of Utopian City [idea 3.2] |
“Utopia
approaches are rarely discussed in current official programs in urban
planning departments. It seems that there is no enthusiasm to understand the relationship between utopian thinking
and urban planning. Paquot (1996) proposed that this blasé attitude
towards utopia is mainly due to the fruitless
results of the previous attempts. In fact, the broad consensus is that
all utopian experiments generally failed (Eveno, 1998)” (Ganjavie, 2012). |
|
Category
3: the application considerations of Utopian City [idea 3.3] |
“Baum suggests that it is important for
planners working in emotionally charged situations not to try to suppress
conflict, for to do so is to sabotage the work of grieving and healing which
needs to be done as part of a process of change. Helping people to discuss their fears, he argues, is a way of seeing past them toward the
future. What is emerging is a notion that the planning process must be
able to create a transitional space between past and future, where people can
imagine stepping away from past memories without feeling that they have lost
their identity or betrayed the objects of memory. They must be able to
imagine alternative futures (Baum 1997)” (Sandercock, 2002). |
|
Category
3: the application considerations of Utopian City [idea 3.4] |
“The
cause of the expulsion of Utopia from contemporary theory is Utopia itself,
and, more concretely, the Utopian
manner of grand narrative which comes at odds with the critical distrust
towards anything totalitarian or uniform. That was the obvious answer.
The less obvious answer demands a rephrasing of the question: can we tolerate
something whose basis of existence is
its non-existence, something that exists only because it cannot exist?” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos,
2001). |
Regarding
Table 1, there are three categories f academic ideas on utopian city, namely,
“the nature of Utopian Thinking”, “the ingredient concepts of Utopian City” and
“the application considerations of Utopian City. A concise description of them
is as follows:
On “the
nature of Utopian Thinking” (category 1), utopian thinking is directed toward
imagining (i) the ideal society and (ii) making radically original urban and
social proposal based on (i). In doing so, it (iii) also exposes the society’s
pathologies.
On “the
ingredient concepts of Utopian City” (category 2), the utopian city topic makes
use of the concepts of: (i) the two thinking moments of critique and
constructive vision, (ii) transformative political action, (iii) the right of
human flourishing, (iv) the formulation of radical goals, (v) future studies,
(vi) cities as containers of dreams, desires, hopes and fears, (vii) a
geometrical spatial form (in the Renaissance), (viii) a spatial form for
balancing between production effectiveness and acceptable condition for a
peaceful existence, (ix) the utopian discourse with revolutionary potential,
and (x) dystopian urban designs.
On “the
application considerations of Utopian City (category 3), there are a number of
themes of considerations, which include utopian thinking-inspired city
planning, the fruitless results of previous utopian thinking-inspired urban
planning endeavors, the incompatibility of (i) the utopian manner of grand
narrative with critical distrust on (i).
All in
all, the academic literature on Utopian City offers a rich set of academic
ideas to encourage a complicated and critical comprehension of Utopian City for
city image analysis in the subject of Geographical Imagination.
Concluding remarks
The account of the agile literature review exercise on
Utopian City and the literature review findings provide helpful information to
learners on literature review and Utopian City. It also points to the guiding
value of this exercise for intellectual learning. Done in an agile way, the
agile literature review exercise is especially suitable for part-time
undergraduate students with a busy rhythm of life. As such, this article offers
academic and pedagogical values to researchers and learners interested in
literature review, research methods and Utopian City (for city image analysis).
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