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The Literary Method of Urban Design: Design Fictions Using Fiction

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/utopianstudies.34.3.0560

2154-9648

Alan Marshall,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

For students of design the world over, there’s usually nowhere near enough time in the school year to build a prototype of each and every single innovative idea that pops into one’s head—let alone to test them all in the social world or the marketplace. To speedily explore as many innovations as possible, students are sometimes encouraged to follow an alternative pathway, to create “design fiction.” Intended to exist only on paper or the screen, a “design fiction” is not really destined for the real world.1 As a learning technique, it allows for a significant degree of technical experimentation as well as the imagining of new social arrangements. Many design experts see this “free-for-all” method as rather annoying and untrustworthy—more art than science. Yet for the most creative students, it serves to liberate them from the various constraints of their discipline. My own peculiar process of “design fiction” is what I call the “Literary Method of Urban Design.” I will come to this method in a moment.Last year, I was invited by the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar, Germany, to contribute artworks for a special exhibition entitled “Ways to Utopia: Life Between Desire and Crisis” (running from April 1, 2023—January 29, 2024).2 This exhibition is a celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the Bauhaus’s first architectural product: a modern suburban family home in the city of Weimar called the Haus Am Horn. Built in 1923 the Haus Am Horn ushered in the Bauhaus style, a streamlined functional elegance presented in clean, bright, hopeful hues.3 Beyond just style, though, the house was proffered up in utopian terms. Its Bauhaus creators suggested that such a home could be mass-produced on an industrial scale cheaply and efficiently to provide elegant living to every single family in Europe, be they rich or poor. In its first iteration, the Staatliches Bauhaus was a high-spirited, playful, future-oriented, and socially aware fine arts and architecture school that ran from 1919 to 1933 in Weimar, then Dessau, then Berlin. However, its liberalism and experimentation away from traditional teaching and practice invited scorn from conservatives and from the Nazi Party. The former took the Bauhaus school’s funding away; the latter shuttered it for good. Despite the closure of the building, the Bauhaus style transformed design across the world as former teachers and ex-students applied Bauhaus principles and approaches in new settings. The old Bauhaus school has since been resurrected, with the opening of Bauhaus Universität Weimar, and the Bauhaus Museum, with locations in Weimar and Dessau.A few years back, Skyhorse Publishers published a book of my own “design fictions” depicting real-world cities set far in the future, each presented in utopian terms.4 Because of this, the Bauhaus approached me to help them celebrate their centennial anniversary by displaying my utopian urban designs in their museum. However, to convey the centenary theme of the exhibition, they requested exactly 100 different artworks of 100 different urban utopias portraying 100 different real-world cities set 100 years in the future. At the time, I had only produced eighty such works over the preceding decade. However, since the exhibition was to include masterworks by Bauhaus design greats like George Muche and Alma Buscher, I did not want to fall short. To make the “century” in quick time, I pushed ahead by deploying my own peculiar “Literary Method of Urban Design.”5 This method comprises three steps: When I used this method for the first time with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) as the literary base, a curator at the Museum of London was tickled enough to include it in an exhibition about the future of London.6Since then, the utopian spark has flowed through many of my urban studies works, including those appearing in the Bauhaus exhibition. The most common reaction I get when people chance upon my urban design fictions is something like “yes, aha, very sci-fi”—even though the design is inspired by a book five centuries old. The sci-fi comment sometimes seems to be thrown out as a criticism, sometimes as a compliment, and sometimes quite neutrally. Whichever is the case, the label causes me some discomfort since so much science fiction is bound up in technological determinism, operating under the assumption that new scientific knowledge and technology determine the character of social settings, rather than the other way around: the way social contexts might structure scientific knowledge and technology. I feel much happier when people accuse me of creating social fantasy than science fiction. Despite this, often my own students go straight to science-fiction literature when I task them with applying the “Literary Method of Urban Design” to predicting the future of their chosen city. (I don’t really know why this is the case, but one of my students suggested that my generally ill-tempered outlook on early twenty-first-century urban life had forced me to imagine cities where I’d be less grumpy.) However, to avoid technological determinism for my new Bauhaus artwork, I have also referred to literary works outside the genre of science fiction. I do this so that social and human factors move into the foreground, pushing science and technology behind.Here, now, I present three such case studies drawn from the exhibition.Set in the early nineteenth century, Leo Tolstoy’s epic tome follows a series of aristocratic Russians along the changing course of the Napoleonic Wars.7 As the grand title suggests, universal ideas of honor and honesty, forbearance and forgiveness, fairness and justice are outlined in times of war and in times of peace. Those who enjoy War and Peace (1867) applaud its historical realism and its socio-psychological complexity.8 Critics, however, suggest it is far too long, far too rambling, and far too militaristic. They also lament its nationalistic message, and the absence of any real critique of Russian society.9During one pivotal chapter, the character General Mikhail Kutuzov takes centerstage within an army war council debating about how best to defend Moscow from Napoleon’s advance. During the debates, the general asks the council a rhetorical question or two, including “What is Russia? Russia is not Moscow. Russia is its army!” The upshot from this is that the Russian army then acts to defend not Moscow—but itself, running away to evade a face-to-face fight with the French army. This might be interpreted as a betrayal of Muscovites by the very institution charged with defending the city—although Tolstoy is sympathetic to what he believes is Kutuzov’s pragmatism. Nonetheless a destructive invasion of Moscow by the French forces does soon ensue.For my Future Moscow scenario (fig. 2), however, I opted for an optimistic vision of the future Moscow, as if in the wake of some future reiteration of Moscow’s abandonment by the Russian military. The Russian military’s abandonment of the capital might, in this speculative future, be viewed as an opportunity for civic liberation, rather than as a security problem. There are myriad crises that might force such a scenario late in the twenty-first century: a reignition of the Russo-Ukrainian war, for example, or in the Baltic, or the Caucasus.10 Any of these could suck Moscow’s military presence dry. This might be compounded by suburban wildfires, caused by drought and exacerbated by climate change, or by radioactive fallout from a nuclear plant accident on the scale of Chernobyl. Add to this another pandemic, either natural or artificial, and the Russian Defense Ministry might be pushed to relocate all its stations and personnel to some isolated area away from the infected crowds of Moscow. Along with the army, all the supporting ancillary agencies will decamp into a rural exile—including Russia’s massive secret service organization. This absence of military and security forces in Moscow would allow the civilian population to take over and reimagine the city in communal terms—including the revitalization of civic urban gardening.Although Tolstoy was happy to praise the virtues—as well as admonish the vices—of the Russian army when he wrote War and Peace, in later years he would transform into a pacificist, or nearly so. He also softened his nationalism. This slow transformation is echoed in the way this future Moscow would become a city of peace, where many Russians might still celebrate their national achievements—but admit it is far better for Russia to allow nearby brotherly nations to coexist on their own.For those Muscovites still fond of the idea of a strong central state, they too are brought round by Tolstoyesque pragmatism. In War and Peace Tolstoy contends that the stalwart morale of the Russian army was the key to eventual victory over Napoleon’s invading forces. The battles most likely to succeed are defensive ones, in which soldiers understand why they are fighting and what they are fighting to protect: their home. Such pragmatism suggests that the Russian soldiers sent to the Ukraine—or the Baltic States—in the future are always going to do a half-hearted job doomed to failure because they do not see how such wars involve the protection of their homeland. Tolstoy also had something to say about the science and art of the nineteenth century—suggesting too much art and science was forged into the world via coercion and violence. Just as science was propelled forward by military engineering or military medicine so art was also, in large part, devoted to validating war and warriors with oversized statues and civic monuments. In “Future Moscow,” though, the civic landscapers attempt to shape their city in acknowledgment of the relationships between science, art, and war—and in the hope of fostering active alternatives.Miguel Cervantes’s two-part novel Don Quixote (1605) follows a seventeenth-century minor nobleman on an epic road trip around the La Mancha countryside of Spain as he passes through some kind of midlife crisis, imagining himself as a romantic and chivalrous medieval knight.11 The “knight” Don Quixote enters into a series of weird misadventures that both bemuse and upset local farmers and merchants, while attracting fame and adoration from the general countryfolk. Dressing up in shiny metal armor is out of date even by the seventeenth century, but many of Quixote’s fans adored his magnificently anachronistic look. In one mock battle, Quixote takes on a group of gigantic whirling windmills and an army of migrating sheep. As Don Quixote wanders the rural landscapes of Spain in a state of delusion, his adopted sidekick, Sancho Panza, tries to bring Quixote gently back into reality, but with little success.Although the novel starts out as a satire of the romance books popular in Cervantes’s time, readers then and now are seduced by Quixote’s soulful humanity, his creative spirit, and his faithful heart, and appreciate the novel’s exploration of the power of imagination and the relationship between idealism and realism.12 Don Quixote is often held up to show how the creative individual might force reality to adjust to one’s dreams—rather than the other way round. Many a realist—especially those who think science deals with only what is real, might castigate the Don Quixote character as either a fantasist or a madman. Yet, written as it was at a time when rationalism and science are on the ascendent in the intellectual world, the novel instead answers that a “surrender to dreams . . . may be madness. But maddest of all is to see life as it is, rather than as it should be.”With due respect to this faith in dreams and in the endearing fantasies of history that Cervantes plays with, I designed the city of Future Cuenca (fig. 3) located in Quixote’s home region of La Mancha, near the Parque Natural de la Serranía de Cuenca. The future city would keep its old character, foregoing modernist architecture. Instead of new-fangled, multilane motorways connecting Cuenca to the rest of Spain, an “old-fashioned” interurban transport (dating from between the time of Quixote and ourselves) is imagined. In addition, the sights and sounds of Don Quixote’s battles, with windmills and sheep, remain to offer up the landscape as a place for creative pilgrimage.The City Builder (1977), by Hungarian writer George Konrad, does not supply a template for a desirable urban setting, but rather warns how not to (accidentally) construct one. The City Builder reads less like a novel, perhaps, than a dark, poetical essay on life in communist Eastern Europe.13 The text follows the life of an urban planner compelled to execute city projects that force inhumane conditions upon the city’s human residents, killing their sense of joy, their passions, their freedom, their desire for love. In order to just survive, city dwellers must take or kill whatever natural resources might be left to them; the maltreatment or deaths of other human beings is regarded of little consequence.14 However, within such a planned city, there are enough cracks in the concrete and iron that nature may occasionally push through; trees growing in crumbing old roofs, rainbows arching above new roofs, pigeons flapping between the rooflines. These impromptu and joyous intrusions prompt a desire to revive nature from human-driven extinction.So we arrive finally at Future Budapest (fig. 4), a city liberated from the cold heart of a rationalistic urban design agenda. This scenario would leave the plants and animals to be free and wild, and we ourselves would also be experiencing liberation. Ecological scientists today try to tell us that nature in a city provides many free “ecosystem services”: pollution control, climate change mitigation, flood management, and so on.15 But in Future Budapest, Nature’s own “stubborn beauty,” Konrad suggests, re-emerges as a welcomed wonder—not for what it gives the city managers, but for how it makes human beings actually feel: more human.These urban design fictions of mine are inspired by books not usually thought of as utopian. Yet when I drew upon them to come up with scenes and scenario for the Bauhaus, I couldn’t escape my own utopian impulses as I accommodated the general theme of the exhibition. The Bauhaus Museum these days generally attracts an audience with some interest in practical design. Because of this, my contribution again provoked comparisons to “science fiction.” But with the “Literary Method of Urban Design,” I claim to be doing something else entirely; something more intentional than accidental (and at the same time more social than technological). Therefore, when I ask my students to follow the method in the classroom, there is a direct link between the person interpreting the fiction and the design that emerges. Though the “Literary Method of Urban Design” seems wildly speculative, obscure, and tangential to practical design, there’s method in the madness, for a student must deeply explore the social world of their chosen literary work and to apply it themselves to a real-world city. I believe the Bauhaus students of 1923 would have enjoyed the process. Having said this, the method surely deviates from traditional design practice, and is also circumspect about technological progress. Yet, if the social insights of good literature can bolster our interrogation of modern-day cities, they might also offer pathways for those cities to be greatly improved.