UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS IN LANDSCAPE AND CULTURAL MOSAIC. VISIONS, VALUES, VULNERABILITY: AN INTRODUCTION

How much is it worth for whom? How long will be worth for? We must not be scared off by mythical names such as the City of the Sun, Utopia, New Atlantis, and we must not give in to the chanting of their Mermaids. Let’s start from Friedman and his definition of urban utopia and dystopia: “utopian thinking: the capacity to imagine a future that departs significantly from what we know to be a general condition of 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”. Emphasis will not be placed on the urban utopias of the perfect city since this field has been widely and finely explored by urban planners and architects. It was, after all, the first topic that was dealt with by many utopians in their description of their little perfect worlds. Rather, we want to explore the abstract spatial forms of utopia and dystopias. The term dystopia is not only used to refer to the extreme consequences of the mistakes of mankind, but also to the conflicts arising from different utopias and particularly between utopias and the real world. Such conflicts will enable us to consider spatial forms in their temporal development, not only as a starting and finishing point but also as a process having intermediate phases that are often concealed by the saying “the ends justify the means”. The age-old dystopia between city and countryside must be overcome. Border areas have never been well defined and are formed by the combination of numerous tesserae that, at times, are juxtaposed like proper mosaic tesserae, and at times represent mixed areas where the single components become blurred and indistinguishable. One’s desire to classify and separate must give way to the analysis of merging, dissolution and enlargement of borders, just like Gottman did in his much praised (but also criticised) Megalopolis.