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Short abstract:

Examining Garnier's An Industrial City (1901) and Bogdanov's Red Star (1908), this paper explores socialist utopian visions of ideal cities and their infrastructures. Despite emancipatory projections, the legacy of these once-utopian projects now manifests as contemporary ecological dystopias.

Long abstract:

Throughout the twentieth century, plans for mass utopia reflected and actively shaped the spatial expectations of the modern subject (Buck-Morss, 2000). This paper focuses on socialist utopianism at the turn of the century by discussing processes of infrastructure construction and their environmental and colonial projections found in two case studies, architect Tony Garnier’s An Industrial City (1901-1917) and polymath Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908).

In 1901, Garnier planned a model city for 35,000 inhabitants, which the architect anticipated would be repeated throughout France and possibly beyond in colonial territories. The utopianism of the project expected that technological progress, industrialization, and railway development would solve colonial violence to attain world peace. Conversely, Bogdanov published a science-fiction novel, Red Star, in 1908. In this book, the protagonist, Leonid, travels through an industrial socialist civilization on Mars with its gargantuan canal infrastructures. Through Leonid’s travels, Bogdanov explains his idea of an industrial socialist utopia, the expected result of a socialist revolution (Stites, 1984).

In the works analyzed, the authors imagined a prosperous future society. However, the historical transitions and transformations of the twentieth century proved otherwise. Today, the built legacies of 20th-century industrial utopian projects, such as large-scale infrastructure, suburbia, and skyscrapers, have become our contemporary ecological dystopias. Keeping this sharp contrast in mind, we elaborate on the possibilities and limits of utopian emancipation through the built environment.