ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter I compared the utopian aspects of Cerdà’s plan for Barcelona, Howard’s Garden City and Le Corbusier’s Modernism. I noted that in the company town of Zlín some of the ideals of Garden City are applied in Modernist forms, and asked how the arguments might be updated in terms of low-impact living. Among issues arising for further consideration were the relation of professional expertise to the tacit knowledge of dwellers, the power relations of philanthropy, and by implication the tension between conventional planning and the need to develop appropriate social architectures. In this chapter I develop the idea of social architecture, looking to departures from the dominant society in the 1960s in the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967 and a subsequent growth of intentional communities that can be viewed as doing research and development work for a self-organizing society.
