Spaces of utopia and dystopia

Generally attributed to the writings of Sir Thomas More, utopia is an ideal place or a kind of ‘heaven on earth’. Dystopia, on the other hand, is an imaginary place, which is deemed undesirable or ‘hellish’. Utopian urban imaginaries have provided all sorts of possibilities for the bourgeois to accumulate power and wealth in the capitalist city (Fishman 2002). By way of contrast, George Orwell in Animal Farm painted a dystopian portrait of Stalinism which drew upon a distinctly non-urban imaginary (Orwell 1945). Meanwhile, critical urban theory continues to be enlivened by occasional discussions of utopia and its social possibilities (Pinder 2002).