Thesis (doctoral)--Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-247).

The author's Habilitationsschrift. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 441-[460]) and index.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Programa de Pós-graduação em Literatura / Made available in DSpace on 2012-10-21T02:29:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0

In the tumultuous atmosphere of the decades leading up to the Civil War, the combined effects of religious millennialism, technological revolutions, and the growth of a capitalist economy led numerous Americans to propose radical schemes for transforming their society. At least a hundred cooperative colonies were founded in the 1830s to 50s, leading Ralph Waldo Emerson to famously observe that it seemed every "reading man" had a "draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket." This dissertation explores a unique strain of mid-nineteenth-century utopianism that featured geometrically distinct architectural and urban plans. These schemes include a square land reform grid and radial republican village proposed by the National Reform Association, phrenologist Orson Fowler's octagon house, Henry Clubb's anti-slavery vegetarian Octagon Settlement Company, a hexagonal city published by the anarchist Josiah Warren, and an ovoid house and circular institution of Equitable Commerce proposed by the Spiritualist John Murray Spear and his followers. I also analyze Thomas Jefferson's octagonal houses and square land grids as precedents for the nineteenth-century utopian projects. The creators of these plans were motivated to embrace geometric forms in part because of an emerging functionalist view that regarded the built environment as capable of not just representing but also directly shaping bodies and minds. At the same time that the geometric utopians spoke a language of functional effects, however, they also, consciously and unconsciously, used their plans as aesthetic and rhetorical devices to convince and inspire potential converts. Social reformers employed geometric diagrams to convey an affect of transparency at a time when many antebellum Americans saw the levers of political and economic power as increasingly mediated and remote. By exploring the links between utopians' ideas about architecture and causes such as phrenology, Spiritualism, anarchism, land reform, abolitionism, vegetarianism, and spelling and writing reform, I construct a deeper context for these geometric utopian projects that recovers some of their radical, imaginative, and critical spark, while shedding new interpretive light on the visual culture of mid-nineteenth-century radical reform movements.

This project examines urban renewal efforts in Eisenhüttenstadt, a German city on the border between Germany and Poland founded in 1950 as a socialist utopian project. Originally called Stalinstadt, Eisenhüttenstadt was planned as a steel manufacturing hub and worker’s paradise. Its products would enable the rise of cities across the Eastern Bloc and its design, focused on the needs of young families, would be a model of humane urban living. Under East German rule the city thrived. Then, in 1991, came German reunification. Today Eisenhüttenstadt suffers from urban blight, massive unemployment, and depopulation. At the same time, state and private actors are working together to revitalize Eisenhüttenstadt, imprinting on the city a new utopianism as they transform it into a new urban paradigm: an environmentally sustainable city that caters to an aging and shrinking population.  My research uses ethnographic, archival, and visual methods to examine these efforts, and asks how new urban futures can be imagined in deindustrializing cities when traditional engines of growth disappear. I observe how architects and municipal officials draw on Eisenhüttenstadt’s legacy of socialist ethics in urban planning—prioritizing an attention to community cohesion, population density, and the economical use of resources both natural and financial—as they address contemporary crises: unemployment and urban emptiness, rising energy costs, an aging population, and an influx of Syrian refugees. My two primary theoretical interests are, broadly, temporality and materiality. I ask how the 20th century’s industrial and material legacies are being reimagined and redeveloped, what logics stand behind those changes, and how those logics—and legacies—are understood by the people who encounter them. I ask how people use their interactions with the built environment to situate themselves in history, as well as how people’s perception of the past influences their imagination of urban futures. And I ask how, as federal mandates are interpreted at the local level, the socialist ethics which influenced Eisenhüttenstadt’s officials reemerge in the present day. I do so over the course of five chapters. Chapter One examines how socialist urban planning was defined in East Germany and how residents of Eisenhüttenstadt experienced the transition from socialism to capitalism. Chapter Two focuses on one element of the urban landscape called the Wohnkomplex and how it is being rebuilt, according to socialist logics, to accommodate the needs of the elderly. Chapter Three examines street names, and how history comes to be experienced or erased in the urban landscape. Chapter Four examines street lamps, whose partial privatization in 2015 set off robust debate about the failure of local government to prioritize citizens’ well-being over financial gain. Chapter Five focuses on the refugee housing crisis and how residents and municipal officials in Eisenhüttenstadt responded to the unexpected need to house thousands of new residents

Challenging the wide-spread hopelessness in relationship to our capacity to produce real alternatives to the abstract and egoistic neoliberal utopia – with its destructive and unfair consequences around the globe in general and specifically in Mallorca – this thesis, understood as performative research, focuses on the conception and development of Situated Collective Utopias.  These would be utopias that can grow generously and unfold not as abstract and consensed projections of futures but as extrusions of very contextual and often dissensual hopes. They are apparatuses to explore our collective abilities to practically, critically and ethically engage in and sustain the making and thinking of difference. A difference that is materialized and shared as a common heritage and that belongs to who cares and takes care of it.  This thesis report contains a theoretical reflection about the concepts of utopia and heritage as well as an ecology of interventions that make and transform their own sites and aim at developing skilled spatial practices that “think through making”. The practical engagements in those particular situations afford an ongoing radical critique of their contexts and several “outside” moments of reflection.  At last, in the active pursue of finding already present Situated Collective Utopias, this thesis also tells various stories of learning from within the radical sharing community of excluded people of Can Gazà, stories which tell about a process of being given through architecting.

Scientistic authors in the latter half of the 19 th century and the early 20th century, such as Ernest Renan and H. G. Wells, discounted revealed religion. Yet they believed in the secular myth of an imminent technological Eden and they elevated science itself to the dignity of a religion. In so doing, they shaped bold visions of the future, drawing heavily on a millenary store of Western myth and metaphor. In historical terms, the myth of an imminent technological Eden represents a survival and a fusion of the ancient Greek myth of the Golden Age along with three Judeo-Christian myths: Biblical time, Earthly Paradise and the Apocalypse. Since the Enlightenment, the process of secularization has drained the religious content of such myths, although it does not deprive them of any of their deeply emotional force. This explains why the 19th century myth of an imminent technological Eden has considerable staying-power, in spite of the many events since 1945 which seem to discredit it.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 2005. / Title from title screen (viewed 20 May 2008). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Dept. of English, Faculty of Arts. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print form.

Proefschrift--Amsterdam. / "Stellingen" (3 p.) laid in. Bibliography: p. [218]-220.