ABSTRACT
Technological utopias of the 19th and early 20th century were equally concerned with the harmonious reinvention of the relationship between humans and the urban space, imagining societies not only improved by new tools and technologies but modeled by them. New means of communication and transportation that were often new and untried were anticipated to reorganize the very concept of the city. One of most creative utopias of
1 CITY TECHNOTOPIAS
When Google launched in 2015 Sidewalk Labs (Labs), a new initiative to improve city life, the new independent start-up described its intentions to develop technology at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds, invoking a quasi-utopian rhetoric of connectivity and sharing which, unlike “other technology solutions applied to cities” which “have failed to solve real-world problems”, would “collectively transform city life”, making it “responsive, equitable, innovative, and human”. Its principles were enunciated in the kind of benevolent, hopeful terms that shaped the early communitarian and libertarian cyber-utopianism of the 1990s, when Howard Rheingold argued that cyberspace could be “one of the informal places where people can rebuild aspects of the community that were lost when the malt shop became a mall” (Rheingold 1994: 36) and William Mitchell described the democratic potential of the future on-line agoras, serving a civitas that would no longer reside on “a suitable patch or earth” but in a virtual “soft city” (Mitchell 1994: 160). If it is
connectivity, aiming to find a solution to the plague of the crowded metropolis, may have been Roadtown, proposed in 1910 by Edgar Chambless. Using the tropes of the human body, “where housing and transportation are fully coordinated by Nature” since “legs are her vehicle of passenger transportation, talons and arms are her freight system and the animal body is the house”, Chambless imagined a linear city built on railway tracks, housing a thousand people per mile”, “surrounded by farmland” so that “one need only to go perpendicular to the town to find (or grow) food”. Described as “a single unified plan for the arrangement of these three functions of civilization-production, transportation, and consumption”, and a workable way of coupling housing and transportation into one mechanism “eliminating all physical, mental and moral waste”, the project was expected to create a happy utopian “environment where selfishness and inequality of opportunity will gradually disappear and where man will finally enjoy all the fruits of his labor” (Chambless 1910: 20, 22, 30).
