Urban landscape between utopia and reality

Abstract

he paper investigates the theme of urbanlandscape and its proximity to the descriptions offered in literary utopias. Clarifying the “visionary”/“utopian” opposition requires the revaluation and the reappraisal of the original significations of utopian space, as they are fixed by the literary texts centered on the idea of social and urban reform, beginning with Morus’ Utopia.Architects have always faced utopia, having to choose between accepting or refuting its ideological dimensions (economic, political, social). This confrontation led to interpretative speculations that encouraged a new architectural discourse, and in the 1970s many theorists declared the death of modernity and the end of utopia, causing a retheorization of utopia, especially at the end of the 20th century, marked by the fall of communism and its architectural projects. Today’s urban and landscape design cannot ignore the retheorization of utopia, especially in postcommunist countries, modeled by social and urban engineering of communist ideology (utopia).