The Wild and the Wicked by Benjamin Hale

Author:Benjamin Hale
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2017-01-27T05:00:00+00:00

The Elixir of Utopia

The Death Star, I suspect, is a pretty unpleasant place to raise a child. Notwithstanding concerns that Lord Vader may trample the family puppy, there’s the clinging and clanging of pipes, the infernal echo, the creepy breathing, the errant laser blasts, and rodentlike robots skittering underfoot. Yet despite these trifling annoyances, the Death Star is a perfectly contained, perfectly functional ecosystem—the dream of urban planners everywhere.

In the mid-1960s, roughly about the time of Rachel Carson’s much ballyhooed fire-ant and songbird cataclysm, an American visionary began charting plans for a model community, a city of tomorrow, that would reinterpret the mistakes of the modern American suburb to build a hybrid city-town-supervillage—a habitable paradise in an otherwise barren and lifeless parking lot. The blueprint for this planned community was to be informed by the successes of previous cities, but it was to be left open-ended so that designers could continue the hunt for new and alternative ways to live communally. It would be an ongoing experiment, a perpetual unfinished project, with shops and homes and streets built up and torn down so that urban planners could unlock the secrets to life in the future, “introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and systems.”

Joy. I don’t know about you, but even just a few months of road construction in my neighborhood makes me ready to put my house on the market.

Whatever the case, the idea was that this model community would draw from the creative energy of industry and enterprise in an evolutionary manner, keeping what was good and discarding what was not good, adopting John Stuart Mill’s maxim that all good ideas float to the surface whereas all bad ones sink to the bottom. As such, this evolutionary vision was in essence a revolutionary vision, not too mired in any particular picture of the ideal city, but an attempt, nevertheless, to make utopia a reality.

Unlike most dream cities, however, the experimental prototype community of tomorrow wasn’t left as a mere idea. Two months after its forward-looking creator had passed away, dozens of well-intentioned collaborators, colleagues, and companions dusted off his notes and, in homage to the great visionary, proceeded to screw up the futurist’s project so colossally that had the as-yet unnamed designer been cryogenically frozen, as gossips and gadflies would later allege, his boiling blood would surely have thawed his icy corpse immediately.4 The botched realization of this ideal neighborhood opened its doors in a location not very far from the beloved stomping ground of little children, exhausted parents, and ten-foot mice. Apart from the enormous geodesic buckyball that is its inexplicable signature, most of us have few other idealistic associations with what we now call Epcot.

Vader and Mickey are infrequently mentioned in the same context, but they do share an affection for self-contained ecosystems as well as giant floating buckyballs. The freakish globe crowning the main plaza in Epcot has its origins in Walt’s visions of placing his entire experimental city under a dome. It’s not clear

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