Utopia

Utopia, coined by Thomas More in 1516, names both “no place” (ou-topos) and “good place” (eu-topos), embodying the tension between impossibility and aspiration. Throughout history, utopian thought has informed urban design: Renaissance “ideal cities” organized by symmetry and fortification, Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City model as a synthesis of town and country, and Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse as a rationalist project of order and light. These visions oscillated between emancipatory promise and authoritarian imposition, where the pursuit of perfection risked suppressing plurality. In critical theory, Ernst Bloch conceived utopia as the anticipatory impulse of hope, while Fredric Jameson cast it as a necessary method for thinking beyond capitalism. For landscape architecture, utopia persists as speculative ecology, communal commons, or experimental grounds that contest the status quo without collapsing into blueprint. Utopia thus names both danger and necessity: the discipline of imagining other ways of living together.

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Critiquing the present, speculating about the future, and engaging in creative thinking to inspire social or environmental change sounds a lot like design. What makes utopian thinking any different? The concept of utopia has been revisited time and again in literature, philosophy, architecture, and urban planning. Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia—literally, “no place”—describes an imaginary […]

/ Beatrice Palmquist

Reports of global warming, biodiversity loss, rising anti-democratic states, heatwaves, wars, and sea-level rise are enough to make anyone discouraged. In these times, hope is crucial—it’s the difference between envisioning a positive future and resigning to the present. Hope drives action, while hopelessness paralyzes. It rejects the status quo and aspires for change, making it vital for progress. Hope can grow and strengthen, but it can also fade.

/ Urška Škerl

Planet City is a worldbuilding project by Liam Young, envisioned as a multilayered city, occupying as little as 0,02 percent of Earth’s surface yet hosting all of the human population. Planet City is testing the Half-Earth idea by Edward O. Wilson, where we put aside half of the planet, to keep biodiversity. We spoke with Liam Young about the idea and the exhibition he curates, Visions of Planet City.

/ Denise Hoffman Brandt

“Excerpts from a project on Trees and Beasts” Denise Hoffman Brandt© Denise Hoffman What do we actually mean when we talk about nature? As a professor in a discipline that since the early 1970s has, mostly, claimed to practice “design with nature”—referencing Ian McHarg’s book (1969) of that title—that’s a question I have often asked. […]

/ Tim Waterman

Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory and Inter-Programme Collaboration Director at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is Chair of the Landscape Research Group (LRG), a Non-Executive Director of the digital arts collective Furtherfield, and an advisor to the Centre for Landscape Democracy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He is also […]

/ Zaš Brezar

We continue with French philosopher Michel Foucault. In his 1967 speech to an architecture audience, he introduced the concept of “heterotopia”. It was published in 1984 as an essay, Des Espaces Autres (Of Other Spaces), and it deals with the nature of space and its relation to society. Heterotopias are unique spatial entities that challenge conventional notions of space and compel reflection on the social, cultural, and ideological matters of our world.

/ Zaš Brezar

Urban biodiversity? Yes, please! Nevertheless … … Due to the transitional phase of our understanding of nature in the light of the Anthropocene, there are still some important notions, contradictions and misunderstandings that need to be addressed. To do so, we will operate with terms like nature, ecology, biodiversity, landscape, and aesthetics, and we’ll focus […]

/ Zaš Brezar

Rotterdam Rooftop Days (Rotterdamse Dakendagen) is an annual festival that promotes rooftop living and emphasises the potential of roofs in mitigating issues of public space, empowering communities, reducing urban heat, increasing urban biodiversity, urban food production etc. It features Knowledge Day, Rotterdam Rooftop Walk, various cultural events and, most importantly, establishes a network of permanently […]

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