ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the utopian preoccupation with the built environment, especially as found in the plans and blueprints of communitarian socialism. In particular, it examines the communitarian proposals of Robert Owen (1771–1858), and the critical response that they provoked within the wider Owenite movement. Owen’s designs were variously criticised for their: architectural conservatism; (self-defeating) ambition; level of abstraction; and substantive contents. The criticisms and alternatives discussed here include those of: the Irish socialist William Thompson (1775–1833); ‘J.C.’, an otherwise unknown correspondent to The New Moral World; and the American spiritualist S.C. Hewitt (b. 1816).
