Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
8
Envisioning sustainable societies
and urban areas
Aims
This chapter explores various methods and approaches to envisioning a sustainable
society, making particular reference to past and present examples of utopian thinking.
In relation to this, the potential and significance of practical experiments, strategies
and plans that focus largely on sustainable design and urban development will be
discussed. Finally, the possible relationship between utopian thinking, scenario analysis
and practical action will be addressed.
The value of utopian writing
Many writers, from Plato (
The Republic
) and Sir Thomas More (
Utopia
) onwards
have offered sophisticated and detailed visions of future utopian, and sometimes
ecotopian
, societies. Some have been fictional romances and others more non-fictional
planning blueprints or intricate philosophical works. Lewis Mumford produced an
enlightening critical study in 1922,
The Story of Utopias
, at a time when the modern
world had been devastated by a world war. For those concerned with fashioning a
more ecologically sustainable and socially just society, the anarchist ideas of William
Morris (
News from Nowhere
), the futurist musings of Edward Bellamy's
Looking
Forward
and, more recently, the bioregionalist extrapolations of Ernest Callenbach
(
Ecotopia
) are possibly the most interesting and influential. There are also a large
number of political dystopias, with Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World
, George
Orwell's
1984
and Margaret Atwood's
The Handmaid's Tale
probably being the
most famous. There are also a large number of green apocalyptic science fiction
novels too, such as John Brunner's
Stand on Zanzibar
, Octavia Butler's
Parable of
the Sower
and Geoff Ryman's
Child Garden
, that are becoming increasingly less
like fiction and more like the world we inhabit, but it has been those panoramic
visions of a future designed for clean, efficient living supported by speedy car travel,
circular airports, eleven-lane highways and elevated walkways allowing more space
for urban road vehicles, that until recently have been perceived by many as the true
image of the future. General Motors's popular
Futurama
exhibit at the 1939 World's
Fair in New York, devised by industrial and Hollywood set-designer Norman Bel
Geddes, articulates the power of the corporate imagination. The social ecology of
Murray Bookchin (
The Ecology of Freedom, From Urbanization to Cities
) is grounded
in historical and social scientific analysis that looks to a different future. For Bookchin
(1980), if utopian thinking has any power and significance at all, it is as a vision
of a new society that brings into view all the pre-given assumptions of contemporary
