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.mheu, Historical Museum of the Urban Environment

Babel and Babylon

Aztec cities

Heavenly Jerusalem

The Fujian Tulou

Utopia

Romorantin, capital of a kingdom...

The city of brotherly love

Saint Petersburg, Peter's great city

Industry, socialism and utopia

Taking technology to new heights

Home sweet home

A towering challenge...

New towns

Conjuring capitals

Auroville: "divine anarchy"

Private cities

Dubai: miracle or mirage?

All eyes on the horizon

.Babel to Dubai: Urban Utopias

Utopia

The literary utopia was born in Europe on a wave of great discoveries, wafted by the winds of humanist reform that shook the Old Continent and by the rising use of the printing press. The archetype of this ideal was undoubtedly Thomas More's Utopia. Creating an ideal state and giving shape to a new society meant showing exactly where the walls should be built. More's work gave a highly detailed account of the island of Utopia and its 40 identical cities, reflecting the sense of equality that permeated the entire place.

The year 2500...

I observed that all who went took the right hand, and all who came the left. This simple method of avoiding obstruction has been lately discovered, so true it is, that all useful inventions are produced by time. By this regulation all obstructions are avoided, and every passage is left free. From the public festivals, where the greatest concourse of people resort, to enjoy an entertainment of which they are naturally fond, and of which it would be unjust to deprive them, each one returns to his home without detriment or danger. I saw not there that ridiculous and turbulent fight of an innumerable number of coaches entangled with each other, and the whole body remain immoveable for three hours together; while the gilded fop, the helpless wretch who suffers himself to be drawn along, forgetting that he has legs, cries out from the coach window, and laments that he is not able to advance. The greatest quantity of people form a circulation that is free, easy, and perfectly regular. I met a hundred carriages loaded with provisions or moveables for one coach, and even in that there was only a man who appeared to be infirm. What are become, I said of those carriages completely gilt, painted, and varnished, that in my time crowded the streets of Paris? Have you then no farmers of taxes, no courtesans, no petits maîtres? Formerly those three despicable tribes insulted the public, and vied with each other in attracting the regard of the honest citizen, who fled with precipitation before them, lest he should be crushed by their chariot-wheels. The nobility of my days regarded the streets of Paris as the lists of the Olympic games, and placed their glory in the havock they made with their horses; then it was, "let him save himself that can."

"Those sort of courses," he replied, "are no longer permitted. Just sumptuary laws have suppressed that barbarous luxury, which served only to propagate a race of lackies and horses. The favourites of fortune no longer indulge in that criminal luxury so injurious to the poor. The nobles of our day use their own legs, and therefore have more money and less of the gout."

Extract from Memoirs of the year two thousand five hundred, by Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1771), translated from the French by W Hooper.

The genre quickly gained a huge following. Works such as Campanella's City of the Sun, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis and Louis-Sébastien Mercier's Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred fostered the view that it was impossible to rethink social relations without also reinventing people's living conditions.

The Island of Utopia, page 2 & 3 of the Louvain edition

Utopia, or The Best State of a Republic

First published in 1516, Utopia is without doubt one of the most celebrated works of the 16th century. The book received even greater exposure thanks to new developments in printing and was a huge success in Europe (initially in Paris and Louvain, and later in the UK). Largely inspired by Plato's Atlantis, Utopia comprises both a critique of the English government of the time and a highly detailed description of the morals, institutions and living conditions of the population of an imaginary island, living under what is portrayed as an ideal political system. Although the author deliberately chose to create a fictitious setting (U-topia*), it is hard not to draw parallels with the discovery of the New World just a few years prior to the book's appearance.

* Thomas More drew on the ambiguity of the English pronunciation of the Greek prefixes "ou" and "eu": ou topia, meaning no place, and eu-topia, meaning good place.

Thomas More

The Englishman Thomas More (1478-1535) was a leading 16th century humanist.

A friend of Erasmus and a trained lawyer, he was fluent in Latin and Greek and led a brilliant political career in the service of King Henry VIII. In 1516, he wrote his celebrated work Utopia, or The Best State of a Republic, which quickly enjoyed huge success in Europe (translated into English in 1551). A staunch catholic, More met a tragic end when he refused to sign a declaration making the king the supreme head of the Church of England, thereby splitting with the Catholic Church under the authority of the Pope in Rome: More was tried for treason and was condemned to death by beheading.