Translator: Carol Wang Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So, think about some big problems this planet is facing.
Think about access to food,
or think about another big problem:
the access to clean water for everyone on this planet.
Or think about another big problem that we are facing here:
the urban growth that can cause slums and inequalities
in most of the cities.
Well, if someone in this audience
is thinking about solving or even addressing
or challenging these problems
through some extreme innovative ways,
well, maybe among you there are some utopian thinkers
or people that think about Utopia.
No offense intended.
What is Utopia?
So Utopia is a word that comes from a Greek word, "topos,"
that means "place,"
and a prefix, that means "no."
So Utopia is a no place, or a place that doesn't exist yet.
And since the moment that this word came into the common language,
other words have been created using "topos" and referring to Utopia,
like "Eu-topia," that means nice place,
or "Dys-topia," that means a bad place.
And so if you have to choose where to go for a weekend,
I suggest you go to the Utopia.
（Laughter）
So, this word was coined by this Englishman,
a man of the Church of England,
in 1516,
so five hundred and one year ago.
And Utopia was the name of an island;
it was part of a book that Thomas More wrote years ago.
So the title of the book was very long:
Libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris
quam festivus de optimo reip[publicae] statu, deq[ue] nuoa Insula Vtopia.
That means, basically,
"Concerning the Best State of Commonwealth or Republic and of the New Island Utopia.
A Truly Golden handbook No less Beneficial Than Entertaining."
So, the book has a long title,
but actually it got a review in it.
So he didn't have to go to Amazon Books to - you know - get some good reviews.
(Laughter)
So Thomas More lived under the king Henry VIII -
not an easy guy, actually -
so who made him a knight
and then, a few years later, ordered his execution
because he didn't give the oath for Henry VIII
to become the king of the Church of England.
And he wrote this book in Latin,
and it was published in 1516 in other places than in England,
and the book was translated in English 35 years the first edition,
and 16 years after Thomas More died -
executed by Henry VIII.
What he provided was a social dreaming.
Let's go one century after Thomas More.
There were new reasons for Utopia.
The new world was discovered, but Europe was like this:
a lot of small states
that were ruled by authorities,
very severe religious or secular authorities -
small states in continuing transformations
because of the war -
74 millions of inhabitants in Europe, so a crowded continent.
Now look at the other side of the ocean, of the Atlantic Ocean:
French colonies, British colonies, 800,000 inhabitants -
at the same time when Europe had 74 million -
a lot of empty space
where to test, experiment,
where to move people in utopian communities,
in new communities, in new societies,
on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
The reasons to leave Europe
between the 17th century and the 19th century -
there were a lot of reasons to leave.
One was the industrial cities produced new health issues.
There were religious and political reasons to leave Europe.
Poverty, inequalities in cities were another reason.
And, of course, wars, that happened in every place in Europe.
So look at this series of maps.
And if you can start from the left, top left,
you will see a series of communities that had been created -
follow the red lines, the red arrows -
you see a lot of new communities
that have been created, that have been generated
between the end of the 17th century and the half of the 19th century.
I have also located Cincinnati with a very small red circle,
and you can see in some of these maps
that there were a lot of experiments around Cincinnati.
So let me show you this map -
this was a utopian city called Hygeia.
Hygeia is a Greek word for health,
so this was the city of health.
Do you recognize something familiar on the bottom of this light?
Can you read something that is familiar?
River Aiiah.
And in fact, Hygeia was supposed to be just 15 minutes from here,
in Ludlow, Kentucky,
so just on the other side of the river -
you can recognize, actually, some part of Cincinnati.
So in the year after,
architects and planners started to design their own Utopia.
Let me introduce you Ebanezer Howard.
At the end of the 19th century,
he generated this idea of garden cities,
and he built one or two of these garden cities.
You can see on the right of the screen: Letchworth -
that was one.
And he advocated for a connection
between the built environment and the natural environment.
He was looking for harmony between these two landscapes,
between these two environments,
to provide a new way to live for the people in England at that time.
And you can see some of this example
in a city that is close to here, Mariemont,
not just because of the architecture but also because of the plan.
Let's go to another utopian thinker.
You probably have recognized Frank Lloyd Wright,
the architect of the falling water house
in Pennsylvania.
So Frank Lloyd Wright
designed his utopia city that was called Broad Acre City.
And again he was looking for the harmony
between the built environment and the natural environment,
the sort of harmony between men, or human beings, and nature.
But he was in the machine age, so-called machine age,
and I have highlighted some of the sentences that he wrote
in the manifesto that was connected with the physical plan of Broad Acre City.
And he said, "No traffic problem. No railroads. No streetcars."
So basically no public transport, just private cars.
He said, "An acre of ground minimum for each individual."
So, a very less dense place
than some of the places that we know.
But you can actually see
that some of these principles are in our suburbs -
so we cannot blame Frank Lloyd Wright for the suburbs,
but, I mean, he gave his contribution to that, I would say.
Let's go to another,
one of the most extreme utopian thinkers:
Paolo Soleri, an Italian architect.
He was educated in Torino, and then he came here in United States,
and he spent all his life in Arizona.
And he was the most extreme
because he designed cities like this,
a city for 900,000 inhabitants.
Actually, he designed cities
or buildings, very large buildings for two millions of inhabitants.
He was very radical, he was very extreme,
and he actually tried to build two cities.
And he was quite successful in that.
Arcosanti was a city that he started to build
in the middle of Sonoran Desert.
He didn't succeed completely,
but at least, I mean, he started to build his own Utopia city.
So, and if you're thinking that all the utopian thinkers
that I have presented to you at a very fast pace
are detached from our daily life
and they are remote in time,
well, let me introduce you another utopian thinker.
Please meet Orville Simpson.
He lived here, 15 minutes from here, in Hyde Park.
This is a picture of Orville Simpson
that appeared on the Life magazine in September 1967.
So although Simpson was not educated as an architect or a planner,
he'd designed, drawn, and created rules and regulation
for a city that he called Victory City.
He made by hand a hundred of maps
that now are conserved at the University of Cincinnati.
So now I think you can legitimately ask me,
"So, but this Utopia has been never realized in some way?"
And the short answer is "No."
The long answer is "Yes."
Because ideas have been transformed in many other things.
And so this utopian thinker,
that think in a way that was completely different from other people,
so they move laterally in order to go further.
They jumped.
They didn't accept
that the only solutions were one or zero.
They were looking something in between those
and something over those numbers.
So, Utopia is an important component
of our common future,
and I advocate for that.
We need utopian thinkers.
We need utopian thinkers
that challenge the way we live in our cities,
that challenge the big problems that we are facing on our planet,
which is actually the only planet that we have.
I really do believe in this.
Thank you.
(Applause)