ABSTRACT
In the first part of this book I reconsidered literary, historical and theoretical Utopias from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. In Chapter Three I charted a shift from the literary and metaphorical intentions of early utopian texts to a practical ambition to build a new society, but argued that Fourier’s phalanstery is more illuminating if read as a literary model. Continuing objections to utopian thought are that it relates only to marginal or elite groups, and that it takes geographically marginal forms in remote rural settlements. In this chapter, then, I consider utopianism on an urban scale, and investigate the role of reformism, philanthropy and professional expertise in relation to a need for new models of power. I move also into the technological period of the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century.
