Many new towns in the USA are built according to precepts based on the nostalgic utopia of the American small town of the Thirties, in allusive reference to its social and communi-tarian contents. That archetypal models and the myth of an ideal past leave no chance for claims of originality, at ease in the confirmation of the symbolic dominance in which the memory, declined on the side of nostalgia, has both an operational role and an aesthetic function: who decides to live there realise the foundational myth of the society in which neo-traditionalism is experienced as emancipation: as a variant of the Borges cartographer, they cover the ground with the map of what they desire it to be. Contextualism and historicism are the theoretical basis of the hypocrisy of this rhetorical stylistic pluralism passed off for freedom, where overly refined use of historicism is pro-posed as a reaction to the Modern compositional language that conceived the language it-self as an incomplete and inadequate form of representation of reality. On the contrary, to be confident that a design language is clear, stable and unique can lead to an ethical form of representation that includes social and communitarian results. If, as Baudrillard noted, Disneyland masks the absence of a level of reality, these new towns are a gamble even greater because in this game of simulacra, in addition to mask the ab-sence, and without the need, of a real basis, it endangers the life itself of what is been imi-tated. Therefore, the will to revive a sort of Gemeinschaft’s socio-spatial relations, in critical opposition of the Gesellschaft, as described by Tönnies, is both social and aesthetic: it is confident in the deterministic ability of these urban fantasies to allow, or define, also the so-cial relations and the forms of its community.

The real construction of a dream, from Celebration to New Urbanism. Determinism in the reproduction of a community in the ethical shapes of urban fantasies / Canclini, Andrea. - STAMPA. - (2017). (Intervento presentato al convegno Fantasy in Reality: Architecture, Representation, Reproduction tenutosi a Londra, Courtauld Institute nel 14-16 Giugno 2017).

The real construction of a dream, from Celebration to New Urbanism. Determinism in the reproduction of a community in the ethical shapes of urban fantasies

CANCLINI, ANDREA
2017

Abstract

Many new towns in the USA are built according to precepts based on the nostalgic utopia of the American small town of the Thirties, in allusive reference to its social and communi-tarian contents. That archetypal models and the myth of an ideal past leave no chance for claims of originality, at ease in the confirmation of the symbolic dominance in which the memory, declined on the side of nostalgia, has both an operational role and an aesthetic function: who decides to live there realise the foundational myth of the society in which neo-traditionalism is experienced as emancipation: as a variant of the Borges cartographer, they cover the ground with the map of what they desire it to be. Contextualism and historicism are the theoretical basis of the hypocrisy of this rhetorical stylistic pluralism passed off for freedom, where overly refined use of historicism is pro-posed as a reaction to the Modern compositional language that conceived the language it-self as an incomplete and inadequate form of representation of reality. On the contrary, to be confident that a design language is clear, stable and unique can lead to an ethical form of representation that includes social and communitarian results. If, as Baudrillard noted, Disneyland masks the absence of a level of reality, these new towns are a gamble even greater because in this game of simulacra, in addition to mask the ab-sence, and without the need, of a real basis, it endangers the life itself of what is been imi-tated. Therefore, the will to revive a sort of Gemeinschaft’s socio-spatial relations, in critical opposition of the Gesellschaft, as described by Tönnies, is both social and aesthetic: it is confident in the deterministic ability of these urban fantasies to allow, or define, also the so-cial relations and the forms of its community.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11583/2686247
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