Once Upon a Time in Venus, 1980
A futurustic a.k.a. contextual utopia…
No not the planet but a 21-acre site in Florida, US in 1980. The place and time when the construction of 10 buildings started designed by futurist Jacque Fresco as part of “The Venus Project”. As opposed to Christiania and other “local” Utopias the “Venus Project” intents to go a step further and pursues a more holistic and global perspective. As stated on their website (2019):
“The Venus Project is a non-profit organization that recognizes the important connection between global resource mismanagement and problems such as war, climate change, poverty, and hunger. In the broader context, these are all detrimental results of the current socio-economic operating system.
In response to these challenges, our organization presents solutions through the holistic application of science and technology; two areas in which recent advancements hold the potential to make far-reaching positive impacts.
Another major issue is that business interests currently require short-term planning and timely returns on investments. For these reasons, in addition to our expanded technical approach, our proposals include an alternative economic model which overcomes these artificial barriers to planetary wellbeing.
Our methodologies are designed to realize the full potential of science and technology to achieve social betterment for all living systems. We advocate new ways of thinking and living to enable human beings, technology, and nature to progress sustainably.”
With a lot of respect I write about the Venus Project, their philosophy, aims and purposes are all with high nobility and extremely good intentions. In addition, apart from only writing about the ‘ideal world’ the Venus Project actually attempts to implement many of their ideas in present-day society. The project and organization is very much focused on redesigning our resource planning, socio-economic, habitual and operating systems with the use of education, science and research. They propose “a transition from a monetary-based society to the eventual realization of a global resource-based economy”. And although attention is given to the ‘human factor’ the emphasize seems to lie on designing, organizing, planning, structuring and managing a perfect society.
The Venus Project is in words and visuals all great, no doubt about it! But let’s just say (hypothetically speaking) a country, state or for ease sake city decides to fully go along with the Venus Project principles. Moreover, Venus Project will have a 100% control over the decision-making and budget, how would that look like? Or even better, if they could create a city from scratch, how will it be? And haven’t we seen that before?
The Venus Project is (in my view) one of the few organizations which takes a global and holistic perspective to such questions and is accurately outspoken about the fundamental flaws of the earth’s current systems and behaviors. Personally I do have my doubts about utopias which tend to be overly contextual, managed and planned for two main reasons:
- Too homogeneous for a heterogeneous world: History proves that rigidly planning, structuring and managing societies (mostly top-down) with the best intentions inevitably leads to the suppression or dissatisfaction of individuals and minorities and eventually leads to rebellion or people fleeing.
- Too rigid for a organic world: All on earth (including ourselves) is organic and part of a larger biological ecosystem. It is unnatural to (think we can) control (to our liking) the organic nature of earth, let alone people. Something organic should most probably grow organic and at most be cultivated and supported in doing so.
- Too short-sided for a world with an infinite future: Former utopias repeatedly (and perhaps inevitably) prove a lack of vision (eventually). Managing all resource globally, providing everybody with a job, getting everybody out of poverty, reducing global mortality to almost 0 are great visions, but what if we have achieved those?
Coming back to the question before, yes, we have seen cities being built based on utopian principles! Ever heard of Palmanova, Auroville, Maharishi Vedic City, Arcosanti, Levittown, Penedo? Those are just a handful of numerous places which had an utopian-like blueprint or vision as a starting point. But in most (if not all) cases they turned out to be quite a different place after all. Eventually any of those places faced the flaws of their utopias which were based on incomplete wisdom, dictated by zeitgeist, too narrow minded and impossible to manage in accordance of the predicted forecasts.
But also in existing towns and cities it appears that all urban planning and architecture are (allegedly) prone to some extent of utopianism. And let’s face it, do you really belief that the people responsible for building and growing a city do it without having an ideal future scenario in mind? The key question is, with which ideals did policy makers, planners, architects or whomever involved build their Utopia’s: money, power, aesthetics, fame, happiness, ecology, nature, work, living, leisure….?
The next story features an utopia built from scratch or in formal terms, an “artificially planned city”. The drivers were clear, becoming the vibrant and blissful heart in one of the largest countries in the world.