Drawings Utopia: City and Environment from Utopia to Lilypad

The ideological character of a utopia is such that its main characteristic is its infeasibility. The representation of a utopia’s location, however, is of a possible reality, and one that we can put it into words and graphic representations. Utopias, being organized social alternatives to what is already known, seem to have close relationships between the great practical and moral questions they seek to solve and the territorial organization of their communities. In fact, we can clearly read, or at least infer, a relationship between the organization of settlement structures and the ideological charge that they represent. Every era has its own utopias related to the issues of the moment. Every utopia therefore has a different relationship with the local context in which is developed. From the polycentric structure of the 54 cities of the original Utopia by Thomas More to Archigram’s Walking City to Vincent Callebaut’s LILYPAD: Floating City for Climate Change Refugees, the representation of utopias identifies specific relationships between the city and the territory. In some utopias, including More’s 16th century treatise, the theme of the relationship between man and the environment in which he lives seems to be part of the transgressive concept of the utopia itself. In a sense, Utopia is the progenitor of Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, part of the great debate on the environmental problems that will be with us for a long time.