Heterotopias and Archipelagos

One of the main attitudes of designers involved in the modernization of architectural and urban culture in the twentieth century was to dissolve the connection with the continuous city inherited by history, and to propose the alternative figure of an open space punctuated by free-standing buildings. Rather than interpreting the history of Modernist planning and architecture as a series of failures to implement innovative schemes of a utopian nature, the way critics celebrating Brasilia and scorning its spontaneous suburbs would do, the author proposes two hypotheses. The first one is an invitation to consider the body of heterotopias imagined and produced as more significant than the body of utopias on which historical narratives have focused. The second one is an invitation to consider cities overlooked in planning histories because they have no clearly identified master plan or master composition. Heterotopias can be viewed as particular ways of shaping usage, but indeed not of building urbanity.