Dimensione spaziale dell’utopia

This paper is dedicated to the spatial dimension of utopia. We are not going to discuss urban planning and utopia since it has already been thoroughly studied by architects and planners, and investigated from the beginning by many utopians in their descriptions of perfect small worlds. We will rather explore the abstract spatial forms of utopia and their dystopias. By dystopia we do not only mean the extreme consequences of mistakes in human trends which lead to unnatural or undesirable worlds, but also the conflicts between different utopias or between utopia and the real world. Some spatial considerations will be made in the first section in order to overcome the long lasting dystopia between town and country; at present, as it was pointed out by Gottman in his celebrated Megalopolis, fusion, mixture, dissolution of boundaries are the new rule. The second and third sections deal with two opposed forms of spatial utopia, namely order as separation, seclusion, distinct overlapping layers, and totality as access, polymorphism, holism. The dream of totality often leads to the lack of roots and identity, to a large grey zone where every person becomes interchangeable, while the dream of order leads to the loss of the global view in the meanders of minutiae. Section four is dedicated to the physical and mathematical utopia of dimension change, to the jump from one to two dimensions and, most appealing, from two to three dimensions. But utopia is also the long known problem of fractional dimensions that in these last years have been made popular by Mandelbrot’s fractals. Finally the last section deals with nets, both material and immaterial, where the limits of dimension can be overcome, and total knowledge seems to be reachable. But new problems arise, since no hierarchy survives and structures are in continuous, chaotic transition through a sequence of disequilibria. As Calvino taught us in his unforgettable book “Le città invisibili”, the utopia of total knowledge and total order contains in its hidden depths the chance of new forms of freedom.