ABSTRACT

Utopia has become a dirty word in recent scholarship on modernism, architecture, urban planning and gender studies. Many utopian designs now appear impractical, manifesting an arrogant disregard for the lived experiences of the ordinary inhabitants who make daily use of global public and private spaces. The essays in Embodied Utopias argue that the gendered body is the crux of the hopes and disappointments of modern urban and suburban utopias of the Americas, Europe and Asia. They reassess utopian projects - masculinist, feminist, colonialist, progressive - of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they survey the dystopian landscapes of the present; and they gesture at the potential for an embodied approach to the urban future, to the changing spaces of cities and virtual landscapes.

chapter |12 pages

Embodied Utopia

part 1|20 pages

Part I

part 2|59 pages

Civilization/Degeneration

chapter 2|18 pages

Making the City Beautiful

Aesthetic Reform and the (Dis)placement of Bodies 1

chapter 3|24 pages

Urban Space, Modernity, and Masculinist Desire

The Utopian Longings of Le Corbusier

chapter 4|14 pages

Dystopia in Utopia

Exoticism and Degeneration in Indochina, 1890–1940

part 3|39 pages

At Home in Public

chapter 5|17 pages

At Home in Public

The Hull House Settlement and the Study of the City

part 4|33 pages

Esprit de Corps and Esprit Décor: Domesticity, Community, and Creative Autonomy in the Building of Female Public Identity

chapter 7|17 pages

A Women's Berlin

How Female Patrons and Architects in Imperial Germany Re-Gendered the City

chapter 8|11 pages

Endeavours and Expectations

Housing Washington's Women

part 5|50 pages

Embodying Urban Design

chapter 9|15 pages

Personal City

Tysons Corner and the Question of Identity 1

chapter 10|16 pages

Re-Reading Disney's Celebration

Gendered Topography in a Heterotopian Pleasure Garden

chapter 11|14 pages

Bangkok Simultopia

part 6|43 pages

Haunting the City

chapter 12|17 pages

Networked Interventions

Debugging the Electronic Frontier

chapter 13|14 pages

Frugality and the City

Hanoi Palimpsest

chapter 14|7 pages

Against Utopia

The Romance of Indeterminate Spaces

part 7|16 pages

Part VII

chapter 15|14 pages

The Time of Architecture