Spirella Building Bridge Road Letchworth Garden City Hertfordshire SG6 4ET

PROGRAMME

12 November 201510:30-19:30

UTOPIAExperiments in perfection

Utopia by Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598)

Tea/coffee/biscuits/fruit from 9.30am

Morning sessions chair: Professor Jonathan Morris, University of HertfordshireSession 1: Situating utopias 10.30 Welcome – David Ames, Head of Heritage and Strategic Planning, Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation10.40 Introduction to SSAHRI conference - Professor John Senior, University of Hertfordshire10.45 Keynote lecture – Professor Alan Powers - Milton Keynes or Civilia? Real and imagined utopia of

the Pop period11.35 Q and A with speaker

Session 2: Exploring utopian places - design, planning and architecture11.45 Mr. David Ames: Letchworth - the first garden city utopia?12.00 Dr. Daniel Marques Sampaio: Canary Wharf and Greenwich Peninsula: Reflections on the Utopias of

Turbo Capitalism12.15 Dr. Paul Cureton: Garden City Utopias & Everyday Life: exploring the spatial accessibility of Welwyn

Garden City 12.30 Eva Sopeoglou: Utopia 'outside': exploring architectural approaches12.45 Dr. Susan Parham: Utopias, food and the radical tradition13.00 Dr. Ian Waites: A paradise, what an idea! The postwar council estate and ‘Utopia’

13.15 Buffet lunch

Afternoon sessions chair: Judy Glasman, University of Hertfordshire Session 3: Considering utopian ideas - health, place, work, gender and beyond14.00 Dr. Pat Simpson: Prince Peter Kropotkin: Anarchism, eugenics and the utopian ideal of Letchworth

Garden City 14.15 Dr. Steve Shelley: Multiple Utopias when exploring the future of work and the environment14.30 Professor Ursula Huws: When Adam blogs: Cultural work and the gender division of labour in Utopia 14.45 Dr. Marta Rabikowska: Community Utopia and Agonism: The role of multiplicity and embodiment in

building community relations in a context of participatory arts in superdiverse community 15.00 Dr. Chamu Kuppuswamy: Urban Commons: Utopian idea or the future? 15.15 Q and A

15.40 Afternoon tea

Session 4: Part A: Investigating the utopian imagination16.00 Alex Anthony-Lewczuk: Re-evaluating DUNE – Ecological and Theological Dystopias?16.15 Dr. Neil Maycroft: Never mind my jet-pack, where’s my four-legged chicken?

16.30 Part B: Facilitated discussion between panelists and participants (ranging across ideas from the whole day, facilitated by Dr Steven Adams)

17.15 Drinks and exhibition

Evening session chair: Professor Matthew Cragoe, University of Lincoln 18.00 Introduction by Professor Matthew Cragoe18.05 Public lecture - Professor Carenza Lewis –

Brave new world or toil and trouble? The long view of new towns19.00 Q and A

19.30 Close

UTOPIA: Experiments in Perfection – 12 November 2015

Abstracts

Session 2:

Letchworth – the first garden city utopia?Mr David Ames, Head of Heritage and Strategic Planning, Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation

The creation of Letchworth Garden City, a utopia, meant as a practical solution to the poor living conditions of the early twentieth century, is discussed. In reality, this led to a practical utopian vision, arising from the master planning of Parker & Unwin, leading to far better conditions for the working classes. However, this is questioned by some social scientists who are of the view that this led to a continued domination by the middle classes, many of whom were considered to be cranks, by the likes of George Orwell. Finally, we look at how Letchworth Garden City today is a close reflection of those original principles.

Canary Wharf and Greenwich Peninsula: Reflections on the Utopias of Turbo CapitalismDr Daniel MARQUES SAMPAIO, Lecturer, Critical and Cultural Studies (Photography), University of Hertfordshire

This paper will consider the utopian discourses supporting and promoting the regeneration of Greenwich Peninsula, an urban project designed to celebrate the new Millennium in London. With its rich history of industrial activity and contested labour relations, from the 19th century to the mid-20th century the Greenwich Peninsula had been used for the production of chemicals, gas works, and other heavy industries. Originally proposed under a Conservative Government but carried out by the Labour Government that succeeded it, one of the (expressed) goals driving this vast regeneration project was to create a portrait of the contemporary condition of Britain, whilst pointing to a future that exceeded that condition.The paper will trace the shift in discourse that took place throughout the process of realising the project, a shift that paralleled Britain’s change of political climate and administration. The outgoing Conservative Government had intended to redevelop the site as a celebration of private enterprise, reflecting Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal ideal of releasing market forces (as manifested in the previous decade in another emblematic site, Canary Wharf). After its electoral victory in 1997, “New Labour” (as the victorious party rebranded itself) attempted to redefine the regeneration of Greenwich Peninsula into a narrative of national renewal by employing a discourse of inclusiveness, consensus, and togetherness. This discourse, suffused with utopian and millenarian rhetoric, pitted the new project against Canary Wharf, the Conservatives’ turbo capitalist utopia of free markets, capital unleashed, and creative destruction. Through an analysis of New Labour’s regeneration discourse, and of the business alliances it formed during the project, a picture emerges of the regeneration of Greenwich Peninsula as an attempt to create an ideal community from scratch, an attempt which entailed ignoring, even erasing, the complex history of the site.

Garden City Utopias & Everyday Life: exploring the spatial accessibility of Welwyn Garden City Dr Paul CURETON, Senior Lecturer in Design Software Skills and Innovation, University of Hertfordshire, and Laurens VERSLUIS, Space Syntax

The concept of utopia, for many people, may have extinguished but the power of imagining cities remains vital (Brook 2013). David Pinder’s (2005) call for critical utopianism in comparison to authoritarian forms of future city is particularly relevant in contemporary projections of ecological cities in the United Kingdom. The evaluation of past visions of cities is therefore of particular importance for utopian studies and future cities. There is of course a disjunction between pure city imaginaries and landed utopias. Welwyn Garden City is a primary case in which to explore the latter and the normative realities of a planned utopian city one hundred and five years later. A Spatial Accessibility by Space Syntax supports several theorems of contemporary city performance regarding landscape urban form and transportation for this paper. These theorems are used to examine the agency of the original planning images of Louis de Soissons (1920), and diagrams of Howard (1898) which are blueprints for an ideology displayed in a paper world, translated into built form. This built form and everyday life of Welwyn Garden City has eroded many of those ideologies but nonetheless they remain a dominant category of city imagination (Hardy 2011).

ReferencesBrook, D., 2013, A History of Future Cities Brook, Dan. Norton & Company.Hardy, D., 2011. From Garden Cities to New Towns. Routledge, London.Pinder, D., 2005. Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism. Edinburgh University Press.Ward, S. (Ed.), 2011. The Garden City. Routledge, London.

Utopia ‘outside’: exploring architectural approachesEva SOPEOGLOU, Lecturer, Interior Architecture and Design, University of Hertfordshire

This paper will address the architectural vision of outdoor and semi-outdoor environments for working, learning and recreation. Several proposals by prominent architects during the period of 1960-1980 formed as a response to the increasing dependence on air-conditioned interiors for everyday activities and the distinct separation between inside and outside living. This separation still exists today where contemporary urban dwellers may spend as much as 80% of their time in indoor and artificially conditioned-spaces. It is appropriate to revisit these proposals and imagine how they may be relevant in current debates about sustainability, wellbeing and adopting healthier lifestyles. The avant-garde architect, researcher and writer Bernard Rudofsky in 1965 proposed an outdoor school of architecture, the Yale Centre for Environmental studies (unbuilt), where the students would study in outdoor workshops and design spaces. His ideas find alignment to earlier experiments of the Open Air Schools movement in the West. One year later, in 1966, the pioneering architect Cedric Price published the Potteries Thinkbelt proposal for a temporary and movable University of the Air, addressing cultural and socio-political aspects of environmental design. One of Price’s last projects, The Generator (1976-1979) involved the design of an outdoor recreation and living environment, a place of social interaction and engagement with nature, supported by advanced architectural technology.

Utopias, food and the radical traditionDr Susan PARHAM, Head of Urbanism, Centre for Sustainable Communities, University of Hertfordshire

The theme of food has long been central to the notion of utopia, understood as a spatial, political, economic and social programme, but the multitudinous ways utopias relate to food are also sources of contestation and difficulty even if this is not always acknowledged. This paper explores the way that food has intertwined with utopian ideas about the design of foodspace from the kitchen outwards; including its ongoing connections to radical politics, expressed in the physical and moral hygiene of vegetarianism, and feminist readings of spatial design and social relations within utopias in the 19th and 20th centuries. The paper will focus in on the experience of the 19th century French utopia of the Phalansterie proposed by Fourier, built by Considerant and later adapted in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. Such utopian ideas and practices in relation to food will then be traced through the experience of the United Kingdom’s industrial villages of vision, Garden Cities and New Towns. Finally, the paper will reflect on what the interplay between food and utopian ideas might offer for the contemporary development of planned settlement space, in particular in relation to architecture, urban design and planning discourse and practice.

A paradise, what an idea! The postwar council estate and ‘Utopia’Dr Ian Waites, Senior Lecturer, Lincoln School of Architecture & Design, University of Lincoln

This paper highlights my research on the Middlefield Lane council estate in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, which was completed in 1965. The estate was a typical product of post-World War Two local and central government policy to provide new housing for working-class families, and of progressive, modernist, ideas in architecture and planning. ‘Progress’, however, has not been kind to these estates, which have been roundly and routinely set up as products of doomed-to-fail ‘utopian’ ideas and dreams. This paper will chronicle some of the ways in which casual references to ‘utopia’ have been used as a stick with which to beat the council estate. Along the way, it will also show how middle-class suburban anxieties and prejudices undermined modernist ideas in the design and planning of the postwar council estate, and even the humblest of ‘utopian’ notions in creating good, modern homes for all. In contrast, and through the examination of the development and settlement of the Middlefield Lane estate in its early years, the paper will attempt to break the endless and reductive cycle of a ‘utopian/dystopian’ discourse, showing that these estates were created not in an attempt to reach impossible utopian goals and dreams, but to provide for more everyday and practicable concerns of sociability, contentment, and well-being.

Session 3:

Prince Peter Kropotkin: Anarchism, eugenics and the utopian ideal of Letchworth Garden CityDr Pat SIMPSON, Reader in Social History of Art, University of Hertfordshire

Prince Peter Kropotkin was a major Russian pre-Revolutionary socialist, who, prior to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, theorised an anarchist [i.e. without a centralised government and associated administrative bureaucracy] theory of a

potential utopian form of social existence. Like the English utopian socialist, William Morris (who may have drawn on Kropotkin’s work), Kropotkin’s ideal was of a semi-agrarian idyll as set out in his book, Farms, Fields and Factories (1898), comprising both intellectual and physical labour.Kropotkin was also very interested in the new discourse area of eugenics, and prominently participated in debates during the 1912 International Congress of Eugenics in London. This paper considers the implications of the records held at the Letchworth Garden City Archive, regarding both Kropotkins’ interest in eugenics and in the construction of utopian anarchist society through innovative social housing projects.

Multiple Utopias when exploring the future of work and the environmentDr Steve SHELLEY, Principal Lecturer in Human Resource Management, University of Hertfordshire Business School

In this paper I reflect on my research project ‘The future of work and employment in Britain in a zero carbon scenario’. What intrigued me was how I could combine my professional interest in work, skills and labour markets, with my personal interest in environmental sustainability. The specific catalyst was the ‘Zero Carbon Britain 2030’ (ZCB) report by the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), which I saw as a radical idea for consumption reduction, lifestyle dietary and land use change, and renewable energy supply. I explored how far ONS labour market statistics, Government UKCES and employer (SSC) strategic plans, ‘academic’ future of work and ‘green’ sources, and the trade unions’ ‘One Million Climate Jobs’ manifesto, recognise the extent of change required in a reduced carbon scenario. Finding a disconnect between these perspectives, I suggested that the prevailing neo-liberal and business-dominated economic context is difficult to align with a substantially reduced-carbon vision, but also that reports such as ZCB may appear too radical and abstract. This disconnect means that there is little substance upon which to base analysis of future work in a reduced-carbon society. In this paper I reflect on the multiple Utopias that have become apparent from the project.

When Adam blogs: Cultural work and the gender division of labour in UtopiaProfessor Ursula HUWS, Professor of Labour and Globalisation, University of Hertfordshire Business School

Taking as its starting point the current resurgence of interest in utopian alternatives to capitalist forms of production, including those based on cultural co-production, this chapter takes a critical look at Utopias, from Thomas More to the present day, which propose idealised future societies in which people are emancipated from exploitative labour relations. It examines the ways in which these Utopias have envisaged cultural labour – whether as specialist artistic occupations or as a general creative dimension of all labour – and relates this to the gender divisions of labour envisaged for these idealised societies. It concludes that most Utopias fail to imagine future changes in the social division between paid and unpaid work. Where these have gone beyond a model of small self-sufficient agrarian communities, even if they have envisaged changes in the technical division of labour, they have reproduced existing gender divisions of labour, excluding unpaid reproductive work from their visions of emancipation and work-sharing. In so doing, they have constructed cultural labour as something which is supported invisibly by the reproductive labour of others.

Community Utopia and Agonism: The role of multiplicity and embodiment in building community relations in a context of participatory arts in superdiverse communityDr Marta RABIKOWSKA, HEA Fellow, Principal Lecturer in Creative Industries, Leader in Creative Employability, University of Hertfordshire

In this presentation I will discuss the complexity of community relations developed through the arts participatory project in an urban suburb of London. I will critique the utopian underpinnings of the “ideal’ of a community as that one which dissolves antagonism and conflicts. I will refer to the concept of agonism by Chantalle Mouffe, who states that ‘struggle must be ‘impure’ to actually reveal the ongoing, unpredictable, and multiple dialectic between power and resistance, while conflicts and problematic issues, or antagonisms, are regarded as essential ‘impurities’ (1993 The Return of the Political). I will question the moralist approach which has been dominating the politics of community organisation and participatory projects since 1990’s. Instead I will propose another form of utopia which lies in unpredictability and paradox. Such ‘community utopia’ appreciates agonism as it opens the way to a new understanding of participation, art’s aims and community politics. Drawing upon Karen Barad’s (2007, Meeting the Universe Halfway) concept of ‘ontological unit’ I will show that people, cultures and materialities affect each other and change under the influence of one another towards new, unpredictable results which eschew logicality and rigid stucturisation. Consequently I will argue that utopia contains the promise of embracing difference and conflict.

Urban Commons: Utopian idea or the future? Dr Chamu KUPPUSWAMY, Senior Lecturer, School of Law, University of Hertfordshire

This paper explores the idea, principle and legal norm of the common heritage of mankind (CHM) and applies this to modern notions of the city. Moving from the global to the local, this paper uses the international law principle governing global commons ranging from the deep seabed to the human genome, to understand whether Urban Commons will increasingly be the reality in our modern towns and cities. It uncovers new notions of ownership in a world of increasing inequality and tries to identify where happiness might be situated in the context of ownership.

Session 4 (Part A):

Re-evaluating DUNE – Ecological and Theological Dystopias?Alex-Anthony LEWCZUK, School of English and Journalism, University of Lincoln

The original Frank Herbert novel is undeniably interrelated with many of the cultural phenomena of the mid-sixties. The intention of this paper is to analyse the work, and its immediate sequel `Dune Messiah` ,from the perspective of concerns regarding the interactivity of speculative fiction, religion and politics. The epic nature of the narrative and the subsequent metamorphosis of the central character, Paul Atreides(Muad`dib) will be addressed from their effectiveness as a mythological saga and with respect to the overall structuralist approach adopted by Herbert in producing a text which effectively re-invents many of the central dogmatisms intrinsic to Utopian/Dystopian philosophies framed within a science -fictional theme.The classification of the work as fantasy ,thereby facilitating the writer`s freedom to produce whatever type of religious belief they wish, without fear of censure on the grounds of Blasphemy ,is also germane to this piece and the clear Messianic overtones of the novel will also be developed. Coupled with the cultural environment at the time of the series` original inception and its` clear acknowledgement of political/machiavellian dealings between the Dominant forces of the religious Bene Gesserit sisterhood & the House Harkonnen, the subtext being one of the likelihood of corruption springing inevitably from power, the tapestry produced by Herbert is one which raises many key interrogatives regarding the nature of humanity and its relationship to political/religious ideologies which will be evaluated within this paper utilising the twin focii of dystopian narrative paradigms and contemporary speculative fiction

Never mind my jet-pack, where’s my four-legged chicken?Design futurism, technology, and Utopian hubrisDr Neil MAYCROFT, Senior Lecturer, College of Arts, University of Lincoln

The early 1970s were driven by diverse Utopian energies. There was still power in ‘high-tech’ visions of material abundance and individual freedom, exemplified by the jet-pack, a key motif of mid-twentieth century Utopian optimism. A competing Utopian longing for ecological and convivial Utopian community was also being strongly promoted, such as in the 1974 ‘Open University’ reader Man-Made Futures. Often these two forces intersected, for example the film Silent Running (1972). All elements meet in Rick Guidice’s illustrations for The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space; jet-packs move smiling colonists through the green abundance of gigantic space cities.Such professional Utopian hubris was gloriously undermined by a simple Utopian desire articulated from everyday life. In 1971 BBC TV’s Tomorrow’s World placed newspaper advertisements asking people what they would like to see invented. Mrs ‘M.M.’ from Nottingham wanted a ‘four-legged chicken’ as it would ‘save a lot of argument in our house’. Forty years later, we have neither jet-packs nor four-legged chickens. This paper asks what happened to derail these Utopian aspirations. It does so in order to ask serious questions about the roles of design futurism and technological determinism in visions of Utopia. We might also ask questions concerning modes of Utopian representation, especially in terms of the rhetorical illustrations used to assign them value.