ABSTRACT
In an essay on new directions in planning theory published at the turn of the millennium, Susan Fainstein identified a return to many preoccupations of the nineteenth century reformers concerned with improving urban conditions and producing a more democratic and just society. Referring to several otherwise quite different approaches to planning theory, namely to what she termed the communicative model, the new urbanism, and the just city, she detected a new optimism and suggested that theorists concerned with outlining and advancing conceptions of the just city in particular have ‘resurrected the spirit of utopia that inspired Ebenezer Howard and his fellow radicals’ (Fainstein 2000: 473). Her arguments will be returned to later but I want to ask first, and more generally, what does it mean to invoke ‘the spirit of utopia’ in the current context? How and why might it be resurrected today? What is the significance of utopia so long after
the grand utopian projects of those ‘founding fathers’ of modern urban planning from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Howard? Why does the concept continue to matter in this field, and how should it be understood and used? Fainstein’s reference might, after all, seem surprising given the disrepute and comparative invisibility into which utopia fell over the last few decades, and the ways in which utopian ideas and projects have been widely dismissed, both within the realms of planning and far beyond them.
