ABSTRACT
This chapter examines urban utopias put forward in the early twentieth century, contrasting Portuguese techno-scientific and British environmental perspectives.
The first utopias are the techno-scientific utopias for Lisbon (1906), by the modernist writer and journalist of socialist leanings Fialho de Almeida – “Monumental Lisbon” – and by the engineer of Saint Simonian inclination and port expert Melo de Matos – “Lisbon in the year 2000”. The second is Ebenezer Howard’s concept of the garden city, whose first materialization took place in Letchworth Garden City (Hertfordshire, England), beginning in 1903. Contrary to Howard’s environmental economics, Melo de Matos and Fialho de Almeida describe an industrial ecology extending the enlightened rationalist tradition of progress grounded in science and technology.
We argue that their crucial differences depended on the differing urban contexts of their emergence and the ideological visions of their authors. But going beyond their obvious differences in what relates to the ways in which they envisioned new urban spaces in their relation to both industrial and green sites, we argue that they both shared a view of nature as téchné which, despite variations, incorporated ingredients that distanced their imagined fabricated nature(s) from primeval/pristine views in crystal-clear contrast with anything man-made.
