The Light of the World, the City, the Society on a Hill: Utopianism and Town Planning. A talk by Ken Worpole

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Town planning has always embodied utopian elements, principally as a land-bound attempt to realize a heaven on earth or recover a pre-lapsarian state of human innocence and dwelling through arcadian forms of settlement. This applies to both cities for the living as well as cities for the dead. The rise of the great Victorian conurbations in Britain shaped a new political class in municipal government dominated by religious nonconformism (particularly Unitarianism) and good works. In turn the late 19th-century Arts & Crafts movement helped inspire The City Beautiful movement particularly in America - which in the case of Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago, also had spiritual roots in Swedenborg’s vision of the heavenly city, Burnham being a lifelong Swedenborgian. In this lecture Ken Worpole will revisit the utopian history of town planning in the UK, arguing that while we should be alert to the many dangers of pattern-book development or social engineering from above, without some vision of economic, environmental and inter-generational equity in the design of new settlements, the future of housing looks very bleak indeed.