Jonathan Morrison
Future imperfect
Can a City’s physical shape ever order society and would we ever want this? Jonathan Morrison analyses the civic experiments offered by philophers, architects and tyrants through the ages
We can date the birth and death of Utopia with some accuracy. It was born, albeit under a different name, in Plato’s Republic in around 375BC, was christened by Thomas More in 1516, and by the end of the 1970s, it seemed to be on its last legs, everyone having had quite enough of architects and their grand visions. Yet the supposed corpse has recently shown signs of life in the form of Neom, a $1 trillion mega-city in Saudi Arabia.
It was first announced by the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2017 as part of the desert kingdom’s Vision 2030, a government-funded plan to reduce its dependence on oil and diversify the economy, which is still 46 per cent based on hydrocarbons. Its site at the top of the Red Sea is intended to enable close trade links with Egypt, particularly in the Sharm el-Sheik area - already a tourist hotspot - but is likely to displace around 20,000 members of the local Howeitat tribe. Construction work began last year, and although some experts have predicted it will take 50 years to complete, Bin Salman has said he expects it to be finished by the end of this decade.
Neom effectively comprises a number of distinct regions. There’s a floating industrial centre and port, called Oxagon due to its shape, which will focus on modern manufacturing, service shipping routes and boast a desalination plant and a hydrogen production one. There will be a ski resort, partially designed by the British firm of Zaha Hadid Architects, who did not respond to requests for comment, called Trojena. Some 50 miles from the coast, in the Sarwat Mountains, Trojena has already been awarded the 2029 Asian Winter Games (it helped that it was the only candidate as the Games have not been held since 2017 due to the cost of hosting them).
There is, of course, an airport and a bay – Neom Bay – on the Gulf of Aqaba. But the major component, and the true showstopper, is The Line - a 170km long, 500m tall and 200m wide mirrored megastructure that is to be built from the Red Sea across the Tabuk desert in – no surprise - a straight line.
The reported principal architects of The Line are the American firm of Morphosis, based in LA and New York, and led by Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne, 79. They did not respond to requests for an interview, but we know this: The Line will house nine million residents, and be powered entirely by renewable energy (although the trillion dollars required will still come from flogging hydrocarbons via the sovereign wealth fund). At its centre is a valley full of trees and greenery; there will be more on the roof. A train will be capable of taking passengers rapidly from end to end in 20 minutes at speeds of 318mph (about the top speed of a Japanese Shinkansen) while delivery drones and robot servants will handle anything else, presumably because indentured workers are starting to cause bad headlines.
To put those dimensions into context, the Shard, London’s and indeed Western Europe’s tallest building, is only 310m tall. As John McElgunn, of RSHP, the UK practice responsible for the 225m-tall Leadenhall Building and Terminal 5 at Heathrow, puts it: “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s basically a wall of skyscrapers. I’m not sure if it’s even physically possible to build it.” And that’s coming from an architect who was asked for his designs for Neom Bay. He adds: “If there’s nothing outside the wall, if you’re always inside and can’t escape.. well, that wouldn’t seem much like utopia to me.”
Trojena, the mountain resort area of Neom, will offer year-round outdoor skiing and adventure sports (NEOM)
We don’t know much about what life inside the Line will look like beyond some marketing fluff – “vertical living”; “work-life balance”; “walkable communities” and no mention of getting stoned to death for adultery – but there is one element that immediately elevates it beyond the mere founding of new cities by tyrants and dictators (St Petersburg by Peter the Great; the New Administrative Capital in Egypt being built today; Port Sunlight by the Lever Brothers) and that is data. Billing itself as a truly “smart city” based around all-pervading technology, Neom intends that data will be used as a currency and will collect it from smartphones, homes, facial recognition camera and other sensors. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would object to sharing all their personal information with a government that lured the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi to its Istanbul consulate in 2018 and dismembered him. Smart city, dumb concept.
But if Neom is set to be a surveillance state, that’s fitting. All concepts of utopia seem to share, at their heart, a belief in social engineering – of control of the population. You can’t rely on people to achieve perfection, they must be locked into it.
Let’s have a quick recap. In The Republic Plato, the Athenian philosopher, imagined a city-state called Kallipolis (“Beautiful City”) ruled by a philosopher-king. Trained for 50 years before being given control, the king alone would be capable of guiding the city towards prosperity. His ideal city featured a rigid caste system, with state-sanctioned marriages and a sort of eugenics programme embracing the infanticide of “defective” or even lower-status children. All works of culture were to be state-approved and for good measure all the poets are exiled. More effort is spent delineating the structure of society than buildings, but we know from his later Laws that he proposed a fixed population with each household having two plots of land - one near the centre, and another further out near the borders – able to support a comfortable though not luxurious life as well as a system of communal meals. And he envisaged large numbers of slaves and transient foreign workers to support this. It’s pretty totalitarian. So the first known sketches of an ideal society actually resemble nightmares.
Of course, notions of justice, class and society, to pick but three strands from the tapestry of human existence, have changed somewhat over the intervening millennia and discussing Plato’s influence on other philosophers would take a library, but suffice to say his ideas on city-states were further developed by thinkers like Cicero, Saint Augustine, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Bertrand Russell. But we’re mainly concerned with architecture here - albeit architecture that seeks to design out human problems and perhaps even human nature - so let’s skip to Thomas More.
More, the English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and saint, was the first to use the word “utopia” (ALAMY)
More, a statesman, scholar and Catholic saint, was the first to use the word “utopia” in 1516 to describe the island state he imagined. It comes from the Greek ou-topos, meaning “no place”, and there has been much discussion over whether, just perhaps, he meant it ironically and described an impossibility, but for now let’s assume he was attempting to delineate his perfect place. Some of it seems surprisingly modern: for instance, the towns are square and contain broad roads “convenient for all carriage” and housing takes the form of flat-roofed, three-storey terraces “faced either with stone, plastering, or brick” running the length of the whole street. “Their buildings are so uniform that a whole side of a street looks like one house,” writes More. And there’s a surprisingly modern edge to the sort of proto-communism espoused, with its communal property and communal work/life efforts directed by a centralised state, and severe punishment of anyone going AWOL.
Hugh Pearman, the architecture critic, said this in a lecture at the Royal Academy: “His model is a compact country with 54 cities. Movement is restricted and passes must be shown at all times. It is a slave society with an elected monarch-for-life. Punishments meted out for sexual misconduct would be familiar to those living in Saudi Arabia. There are sumptuary laws governing the way people must dress. Everyone must do certain kinds of work, especially manual labour. To keep the population absolutely stable, it is forcibly moved around the cities or sent off to colonies. It is all very prophetic of Mao’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution.”
Yet many more theorists and cranks would follow: the concept found fertile ground in the renaissance mind. One notable example is the Southern Italian priest, philosopher and political dissident, Tommaso Campanella, whose Citta del Sole, written in 1602, envisaged an egalitarian theocratic conurbation where no occupation is regarded as of lower status, and where only idleness is despised, but where women, children and other goods are held in common by the male residents. The city is circular and protected by seven walls named after the seven identified planets, and on the walls, and the walls of the palatial residences, is painted the sum of human knowledge – a proposed democratisation of information that is unprecedented until the internet, perhaps. At the centre is a temple of the sun, where the ruling King-Priest resides and presides over a natural religion based on observing the stars. As befits a Dominican friar with a belief in astrology, who was imprisoned and tortured for heresy while writing it, the Citta skirts the line between madness and originality.
More likely to become reality was Sforzinda, named after Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, and designed in the shape of an eight-pointed star, surrounded by a circular moat, by architect Antonio di Pietro Averlino, known as Filarete. Filarete envisaged ten-storey “houses of virtue and vice”, with brothels at the base and academies at the top, and was also heavily influenced by his interest in astrology, hence the eight-pointed star. But the basic design, with canals and avenues converging on a central square is a good one and anticipates the fortified city of Palmanova, founded by the Venetian republic in 1593. Intended to be a “perfect renaissance city” it proved to be so unpopular that Venice later offered to pardon prisoners if they would settle there, with the inhabitants of the sea-city rejecting it as too sterile!
Herein lies the basic problem: if utopias attempt to exercise control over their citizens, humanity tends to push towards freedom. As Robert Adam, the Royal Academician and architect, puts it: “The idea that a perfect city creates perfect people is surprisingly enduring. Perhaps all architects want to create a utopia, but human nature is so much cruder and messier than that. If you look at how market towns, or places like London and post-imperial Rome, evolved – you get the most permanent building when law and order breaks down and people need to create solid structures to enforce their claims. And these are the places we love.”
Of course, if there was one century that made control of the population an absolute priority, it was the 20th. Both fascism and communism enlisted architecture in pursuit of their ideologies – Albert Speer famously designing a “Germania” for Hitler to replace Berlin, whilst the constructivism that emerged in Russia after 1917 is no less didactic in intent, though generally better regarded.
The Unite d’habitation, an apartment building in Marseille by Le Corbusier (ALAMY)
There was, of course, another great 20th century “ism” that wanted to recreate the world in its image – modernism. Its high priest was the Franco-Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier. He flirted with the new Soviet Union, competing to build a Palace of the Soviets on the site of a demolished cathedral, but it was Paris that he really set his sights on. In 1922, he first proposed an imaginary city of three million residents – the Ville Contemporaine – based around sixty-storey cruciform skyscrapers with a combined airport, bus and railway station at the centre. In 1925 he proposed demolishing half of central Paris – Plan Voisin – and replacing it with 18 of the same monstrous towers on the right bank of the Seine, arguing that it would benefit poorer Parisians pushed to the outskirts and into districts rife with tuberculosis.
Whilst that was considered too radical, Corbusier would get the chance to implement his ideas at Chandigarh, India, in the 1950s, somewhat successfully. His Unité d’Habitation, built between 1947 and 1952, would become the ancestors of tower blocks across the world – the first and most famous in Marseille is now highly desirable, with the writer and director Jonathan Meades one famous resident, even if their progeny are usually less so. Best characterised by his indifference to history, Le Corbusier’s influence was unrivalled at the time and his legacy – seen in places as diverse as Thamesmead in London, the setting for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and Brazilia, the federal capital with its congestion and sprawl - continues to be fiercely debated.
Corbusier would get the chance to implement his ideas at Chandigarh, India, in the 1950s (ALAMY)
There are too many concepts of Utopia to mention, but according to Alan Dunlop, professor of architecture at Liverpool University, the best examples from the last century would be Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City and Louis Kahn’s plans for the future of Philadelphia.
Wright’s Broadacre City in 1932 proposed the individual own¬ership of homes, farms and places of employment – with every family getting a single one-acre plot of land on which to build - and public ownership of all power, transportation and utilities. Broadacre City was set out for the automobile and would facilitate the “salvation of America” through technological advances. As Dunlop says: “His social reforms and public ownership ideas went down like a lead balloon in the US, as you could imagine” but the influence on American suburbs was substantial.
Commissioned by Edmund Bacon, executive director of the Planning Commission and the father of the actor Kevin Bacon, Louis Kahn’s plan to revitalise Philadelphia in 1963, by contrast, imagined a car-free city. Dunlop says: “For Kahn, who did not drive, Philadelphia’s enemy was the automobile and he wanted them exiled to the periphery, leaving the centre free for pedestrians. Although both these utopias never made it off the drawing board, some ideas have influenced contemporary thinking, particularly Kahn’s proposals for a car-free environment.”
So if architects normally afforded a “great” like Le Corbusier, Wright and Kahn failed to implement their utopias, is it even possible to create something approaching a perfect city? Let’s ask one of the greatest living architects, Lord Foster. He is careful to describe “the art of anticipating the future” as “strategic planning”, but points out that there’s actually a consensus on what makes the most desirable cities, that “they have similar characteristics despite differing DNAs.”
He explains what we like: “That it’s compact, not sprawling, that there’s a core of cultural offerings like theatres and galleries, and that they are surrounded by neighbourhoods that are walkable, green, quiet, clean, safe and inclusive. We like variety too – perhaps that’s the ultimate luxury - and spontaneity, so it can’t be too didactic.
“A utopian vision is about planning for the future and future trends, but you have to leave part to chance – an ideal city has imperfections, accidental elements. The idea of perfection implies control and therefore something Orwellian: and that’s the opposite of what we find desirable.”
At the centre of The Line will be a valley full of trees and greenery and, of course, sculling (GETTY IMAGES)
And so back to Neom, a vast slice of the future being built in an intolerant state. Amnesty International has this to say: “As a prestige project for the Saudi authorities, Neom is set to be steamrollered through regardless. There have already been reports of serious human rights violations in and we fear that a project on this scale in a country as authoritarian as Saudi Arabia will almost inevitably lead to many more.” There have been reports of forcible evictions and death sentences for those who refuse to move.
Furthermore, no one’s quite identified where the people living there will come from: oligarchs, migrant workers, Saudis, all sharing the same train, up and down, never diverging? Beyond the glossy sci-fi renderings, there’s little firm information. We know about the data harvesting, the huge mirrored barrier to migrating birds and tribes, but not much about day-to-day life: will it be heaven or a long slice of hell?
“It’s totally bizarre,” says Robert Adam. “It’s never going to happen in the form shown. It’s a fantasy and I’m deeply sceptical.”
“It’s an insane proposal,” says Dunlop. “At least Khan and Wright wanted to benefit society: Neom will do nothing for the greater good.”
So will it happen? Certainly no one’s tried throwing this amount of money and resources at it before. It would be unwise to bet against the fantasy becoming a reality just yet.
Other new-topias
Telosa, TBC, United States, projected completion date: 2050
With a name derived from the Greek for “higher purpose” – “telos” - this metropolis for five million people, above, is being backed to the tune of $400 billion, or at least a large chunk of it, by the former Walmart president and billionaire Marc Lore. Ultra-green and easily walkable, with a ban on vehicles powered by fossil fuels, it has been designed by Bjarke Ingels, Silicon Valley’s favourite architect, with an enormous skyscraper at the centre. So far there only seems to be one problem: finding the exact patch of cheap land to build it on, whether southwestern desert or Appalachian scrub.
BiodiverCity, Penang, Malaysia, 2030
Also largely designed by Bjarke Ingels, this masterplan for a group of islands and artificial islands off the west coast of the peninsular proposes to create “lilypads” where humans and nature coexist. It’s still in there planning phase, but buildings are to be fabricated from bamboo, timber and “green concrete” that uses recycled materials and connected by autonomous water, air and land-based transportation systems, whilst a 200-hectare digital park, focusing on robotics and virtual reality, will help drive economic development.
New Administrative Capital, Cairo, Egypt, 2030
With a crystal pyramid, vast palace for the president, giant highways and bridges straddling an area five times the size of Washington DC, and with Africa’s tallest skyscraper at its centre, this megaproject - which is halfway to completion - is supposed to offer the nation an alternative centre to the pollution and chaos of Cairo (and insulation for its rulers from the regular protests). A military headquarters called the Octagon - which is seven times the size of the Pentagon - shows where the real power lies.
Nusantara, Borneo, Indonesia, 2045
With Jakarta threatened by rising sea levels and subsidence, the Indonesian government has decided to move the country’s capital 1000km to the east of the world’s third-largest island at a cost of $35 billion. The first phase of the audacious project is scheduled for completion by the end of 2024, and the target is for a population of nearly two million by 2045, with all energy renewable and 80 per cent of transportation being public. Environmental groups have warned that the scheme risks accelerating the destruction of rainforests that are home to orangutans and sun bears.
Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, UK, 1967 onwards
The last of the new towns built to stop overcrowding in London, and built across green fields and prime farmland at a cost of £1.5 billion, Milton Keynes was once the butt of jokes, mocked for its 130 roundabouts, the apparently soulless lo-rise suburbs and, of course, the concrete cows. But arguably it is one of the most successful new cities in the world, providing a slice of the British dream through its greenery, affordability, prosperity and excellent transport links.
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