Archinect - News

Documentary seeks funding to finish tour of UK-engineered social utopias

2016-09-01T13:03:00-04:00

What are dreams made of? More importantly, how are these dreams executed, and how do we live in the corresponding gap between vision and reality? For the residents of the U.K. towns Basildon and Essex, who dwell in post-World War II "New Towns" designed to be social utopias, their struggles to thrive in a globalized reality are being chronicled in the documentary "New Town Utopias." The filmmakers, who have shot over 100 hours of footage, are currently seeking funding via Kickstarter to help them complete the film.

While the film centers around the creative community, it also investigates the larger historical questions of place and belonging. As the Kickstarter description notes, "It is a meditation on British social history that asks the question: do people make the place… or does a place make the people?"

For more on innovative architectural documentaries:

"Latin America is where modernist Utopia went to die." – A closer look at the changing urban landscape of Caracas

2015-11-25T17:24:00-05:00

‘El mejor anuncio de la historia’, or ‘the best ad in history’ is a picture taken in February 2008, which neatly encapsulates several aspects of the city’s urban landscape: the formal, the informal and the promotional. '[...]Around and in between the super bloques a carpet of slums has grown, an organism that now seems to bind the blocks together in some symbiotic relationship. These are the kind of hybrid forms that are developing in Latin American cities [...]’

Related in the Archinect news:

10 Failed Utopian Cities That Influenced the Future

2015-03-24T22:51:00-04:00

Bonus: BoozeTown, the Crazy-Ass Town of Drunks

It is still up for debate, but I will say real estate ownership might be abolished and become irrelevant.