An agile literature review on utopian city for city image analysis

 

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).

 

References

Binaa, O., Inchb, A. and Pereira, L. 2020. “Beyond techno-utopia and its discontents: On the role of utopianism and speculative fiction in shaping alternatives to the smart city imaginary” Futures 115. 102475: (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.102475).

Cunningham, F. 2010. “Triangulating utopia: Benjamin, Lefebvre, Tafuri” City 14(3): 268-277, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2010.482268.

Friedmann, J. 2000. “The Good City: In Defense of Utopian Thinking” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24(2) June: 460-472.

Ganjavie, A. 2012. “Role of Utopia for Design of Future Cities: Utopia in Urban Planning Literature” Studies in Literature and Language 5(3): 10-19.

Ganjavie, A. 2015. “On the future of urban design: Fabricating the future through Bloch’s utopians” Planning Theory 14(1): 90–108.

Macleod, G. and Ward, K. 2002. “Spaces of utopia and dystopia: landscaping the contemporary city” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 84(3-4): 153-170, DOI: 10.1111/j.0435-3684.2002.00121.x.

Nichols, J. 2008. “An Analysis of Abject Urban Spaces” space and culture 11(4) November: 459-474. DOI: 10.1177/1206331208320482.

Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. 2001. “Mapping utopias: a voyage ot placelessness” Law and Critique 12: 135–157.

Sandercock, L. 2002. “Practicing Utopia: Sustaining Cities” disP–The Planning Review 38(148): 4-9, DOI: 10.1080/02513625.2002.10556791.

SŁodczyk, J. 2016. “In search of an ideal city: the influence of utopian ideas on urban planning” STUDIA MIEJSKIE tom 24: 145-156.

Solinís, G. 2006. “Utopia, the Origins and Invention of Western Urban Design” Diogenes 209: 79–87.

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