Visions of the City

It is a comprehensive history of utopian urbanism both as a social movement and as a movement in urban planning in the past century. It begins with Ebenezer Howard's garden cities movement and then moves from Le Corbusier to the surrealists to the situationists. David Pinder argues that utopianism usually follows two forms--as an impulse to improve social processes without much thought given to urban form, and as an impulse to order social life for the better via rational planning, which necessarily relies on improving and rationalizing the physical environment. The situationists of France and the low countries in the 1950s-60s merged the two impulses, demanding an urban form and a social system that would generate the good society (not for nothing was their most famous slogan "demand the impossible"). The book covers European movements primarily, but features a chapter on Le Corbusier visit to New York in 1935.