Planning, Design, Technology: utopie minimaliste del secolo nuovo. Planning, Design, Technology: minimalist utopias of the new century.

It is common to agree that our the century, as opposed to the previous one, is without great visions or great utopias. Or rather, that our whole culture seems conditioned by the legacy of a recent past, such as that of the twentieth century, marked by the emergence of some great ideologies and their fall. On one hand, this condition has been taken in its positive sense, as awareness to the failure and of the exhaustion of the utopias of the twentieth century – as advocated by Bertolt Brecht in its Galileo’s sentence 'Unhappy the land that needs heroes' (Brecht, Life Galileo, scene 13); on the other, it is reason of a latent fear that the total and absolute surrender to any utopian vision can lead to the ‘aporia’, both cultural and existential one. This double condition of the contemporary concept of utopia is also evident in the lexical use of this word, which is sometimes assumed with a restrictive value (as not feasible model, abstract), other times to emphasize the critical reply to existing situations and the positive capacity to direct forms of social renewal (almost as opposed to ideology). And if all this assumes a clear critical meaning from a cultural and social point of view, even the design disciplines, which are focused to ‘give places and instruments’ to the societies, are invested heavily by this absence of utopias and visions. In the current debate within the design disciplines, the term utopia seems to cancel his positive sense of 'eutopian' – of 'good place', the horizon of the 'not yet' to which turn a critical and projectual look – in order to silently accept the darkest and negative dimension of 'outopia' – place of chimera, unreachable, the 'place that there is'. This is a sort of 'utopistic discomfort' (Moneti, 2011), where the utopian thinking seems to outline an attitude of disillusionment towards any not achievable models . Conversely, a way for a different form of utopia or rather to a different purpose and meaning of the 'utopian thinking' is opening. It is no longer looking for worlds too much perfect and too remote to be able to aspire to become real or, simply, to be a guide of an ethically-political act. Contemporary society is so strongly marked by endemic uncertainties and insecurities (Prigogine, 1997) and the liquefaction of the social and cultural ties (Bauman, 2005). And it seems to refuse any larger totalizing action, far from being realized, in order to reach many small possible actions as result of many small visions that draw then a collective vision: unique because shared, plural because sum of several. In short, it is possible to switch from maximizing logic of utopia to that of 'minimalist utopias' (Zoja, 2013) where, as claimed by Yona Friedman: "To believe in utopia and be realistic at the same time it is [more] a contradiction." (Friedman, 2003). Under this logic of 'minimalist utopia', John Thackara wrote in 2005 his ‘In the bubble. Designing in a complex world': he tried to systematize the urgent social, technological, economic and environmental, and asking to the design disciplines to have visions, to build possible (although minimal) utopias. Ten chapters (in the original version) are to describe ten keywords or, better, for ten utopias minimum investing, 'democratically', every design action. The strength of these ‘minimum’ utopias is in the possibility to be reassembled with different weights and measures, not to describe perfect worlds, but to be implemented in many different real worlds.