Total control and spontaneous processes. Two antithetical contemporary utopias as means of imagining the future cities

Utopias are ideal forms that our imagination attributes to a future reality. It has been a common practice throughout the history of architecture to use utopia as a means of imagining the future city, or the ideal city. Two types of process have always guided, in parallel, the evolution of humanity: on the one hand, the technological one, today also informatics, based on human intellect and on scientific research; on the other, the one guided by the impulses of the individual or of society, contingent and variable, spontaneous and hard to program. Consequently, two different visions of the future city, two guidelines for imagining it, are outlined. On the one hand, hypertechnological scenarios open up, in which computerization is the basis of everyday urban life and digital space is overlaid with public space; on the other, new living models are inspired by the logic of spontaneous architecture for the planning of a city whose rules are mainly dictated by desires and needs. On the one hand, total programming, on the other, the freest spontaneity. On the one hand the informatic city, on the other the informal city. The intention is to compare the two utopias, which correspond to the two strategies that we use to imagine the future of our cities: the extraordinary and increasingly rapid technological development and the study of the tensions that guide spontaneous human processes. Although the two roads may seem antithetical, they actually try to respond to the same need: to design the spaces of a city that is fit for a contemporary man, that is able to respond to his needs and those of today’s society. The world is in a phase of change whose consequences are becoming more and more tangible day after day, both from an ecological and a social point of view. But is it possible to define which the best way to live in the midst of these changes is? Total control, capable of contemplating all the possible variables of change, or leaving room for randomness to the natural development of things and to be able to find from time to time, for each problem, a new solution? An attempt will be made to define, through the analysis of contemporary utopias – now almost becoming reality -, through which roads we are leading antithetical visions of the future city. On the one hand Neom (Saudi Arabia), the largest smart city in the world, on the other Almere Oosterwold (Holland), experimenting in urban self-organization.