95 Planning and Designing Better Communities What most intrigued Badut about the project was the chance to diverge from “the old way of designing a utopian or ideal city, in which everything would have a kind of opulent vibe, with lots of piazzas and super intricate buildings,” she said. Utopian Disruption shares some characteristics with classic approaches to utopian cities. Like Sforzinda, it has a geometric symmetry with an emphasis on waterways. In Utopian Disruption, four canals meet at the city’s center. These canals extend outward throughout the city and are designed to be scalable as the city expands. As the city moves away from the center, open space increases. The architecture becomes more integrated into the “organicity of green areas,” Badut wrote in the project notes. There is a futuristic quality to Utopian Disruption, an almost mythic, garden-like quality. At the same time, it looks like a city, with skyscrapers and parks and recognizable infrastructure. One of the project’s guiding principles was to avoid using architectural styles, such as baroque, that have historically been used to depict utopian cities throughout history. “It’s not about luxurious spaces or castles or fountains,” Badut said. “It was more like we wanted to use contemporary and affordable architecture that people can interact with, including beautiful public spaces, parks, and waterways. It’s very conceptual, but when you look at the buildings and how they’re placed next to one another, it’s basically North American-inspired architecture. We wanted to take what’s existing yet propose a design approach that could scale from very small plot-scale interventions to vast cities.” The team also didn’t hold back on one of its strengths: realistic visualization. “The way the project’s concept also includes the necessary industrial parts, with pipes and gas tanks, that’s something you typically wouldn’t see in the planning of an ideal city,” Buehler said. Buehler hopes Utopian Disruption will inspire professional urban planners to plan ideal cities, despite the inherent limitations of contemporary construction principles. These cities would stress the inclusion of public space, parks, and other places where nature and culture meet. Ideal Futures in the Present Utopian Disruption is not a detailed blueprint of a city. It doesn’t confront the gritty planning realities of sprawl, traffic, walkability, and pollution. Yet, it’s not obsessively ideal. Instead, it shows what can be achieved. “It’s not just aqueducts and green ponds and lush gardens,” Buehler said. “Reality is a bit messier, and it’s OK to see industrial infrastructure. But if we could just push ourselves a little, we could do this.” Badut and Gehmann were careful to make the ultimate borders of the city invisible, something for the reader to fill in. Badut compares it to a puzzle piece, a place in flux where the viewer can imagine how the city might expand, perhaps eventually meshing with similar cities. “A boundary is no sharp line, but a transition zone where something different begins,” she wrote. This echoes the democratic ideal Buehler noticed in favelas, where the lack of rigid urban planning gives residents an opportunity to sculpt their neighborhood’s contours. “This idea of letting a story have an impact on the viewer was really important to me, which is why I didn’t want to have any boundaries,” Badut said. “So it wasn’t only about making it beautiful or functional. It was also about what stories the viewer can generate. It can be like a book without an ending.”
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