Planning as Poetry

Utopia is a sticky thing. Whether it be the machine in the garden, the communal festival of free love, personal helicopters, or an entire block painted the same color, there just seem to be certain ideas that can't be banished from our collective mind. Riis, Adams, Howard, and Ruskin wanted to return to nature; modern men from Sant'Elia through Mies wanted to return to first principles; and Katz and Duany want to return to a Norman Rockwell painting. A barely remembered ideal time always seems just beyond the edge of the fingertips. While it's easy to ridicule the dreamers, our daily life seems to be a patchwork quilt of half-realized, badly-conceived, and unintentionally executed fantasies. If it weren't for the fever-dream visions of Gaudi, where would Barcelona be? Would the windy city be timid without the brash confidence of Burnham? If Wright hadn't pitched his bizarre anti-city of snailmobiles and suburban cropland would the good citizens of Omaha be lined up cheek-by-jowl in great shining CIAM towers like some kind of Zamiatinian nightmare? For that matter, is the real utopia the one he was afraid of: the collective paradise of "administration of things" that a few constructivists celebrated in a brief warm summer between the Great War and the end of their world? Maybe the whole design exercise is a cynical cabal out to enrich themselves at the expense of the worker. It's hard to tell if the pig is Orwell's or Golding's. Who dreams our dreams? Do Fitzgerald's enclosed elites dream for themselves, or are they unwitting dupes of the graphite-stained wretches of the world that make fine art out of Manhattan's zoning and houses out of ocean liners. Maybe the system dreams for itself - pulled inexorably through time by an iron-fisted dialectic, with its passengers none the wiser.