Slouching Toward Utopia

The term “utopia” gets tossed around at a rate that’s unfair to lovers of colorful language; the Container Store, called a “utopia for the organized,” probably wasn’t what Thomas More meant when he wrote about streamlining society. But the word still evokes fictional islands where puppy poop smells like roses and the threat level’s never orange. And while we might reserve the term for communities established by like-minded isolationist zealots, it remains an appropriate — and instructive — label for towns aiming to attract a certain citizenry, whether by concessions, amenities, architecture or shared faith. These five spots provide developers and urbanists with a study of design dos and don’ts.

Sun City, Arizona

Bricks, mortar and marketing

Thriving homogeneous communities are sometimes born not of zealotry, but marketing. “I see [the planning of utopian communities] only as niche marketing — the sort of niche appeal that these places are making is a way to differentiate them in the marketplace, like a car,” says Jack Davis, a vice president of Chicago Metropolis 2020. “You want to make the Prius of upscale urban communities.”

When a product addresses a need no one knew they had — say, changing channels from across the room — something that once seemed ridiculous comes to feel perfectly natural. Consider how many American children — college students, even — have never known a world without the Internet, mobile phones or MapQuest. It’s equally hard to imagine a time when senior citizens didn’t live together in gated communities, or when living in Arizona meant you either drove cattle or just hated rain. But Arizona became a mecca for the retired only 47 years ago, thanks to sloganeering by the Del Webb company.

The company envisioned Sun City as a community where seniors would age comfortably away from the cold — where they could enjoy an active lifestyle filled with tennis courts, pools and horses. Sun City exemplifies the tenets of utopia without fanaticism: A community made for a specific demographic, built with amenities and administration geared to their benefit. And Del Webb established not so much a community as a brand: Sun City became the model for myriad retirement spots, including a string of similarly-named Del Webb properties in Georgia, Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey.

Arcosanti, Arizona

Does your market exist yet?

Marketing, however, presupposes a market. You may think you have a bang-up concept — say, a magazine called Guns and Ham for the gentile NRA member with a hankering for swine — but the potential audience has to be large enough to justify the product. When Paolo Soleri, apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright, envisioned a town in the ’70s that produced as much energy as it expended, he got Arcosanti — a place that wound up selling like a Victoria’s Secret franchise in Baghdad.

“It is the issue, as with any product, of knowing your market,” says L. Beth Yockey, coauthor of Craving Community: The New American Dream, a study of the nation’s yearning for community as a replacement for the extended family. “In the Pacific Northwest, for instance, it’s a very environmentally conscious area. They have a lot of money, a passion for the outdoors, and a passion for sustainability. That market may not have existed [for Soleri].”

Nowadays, the breadth of Al Gore-mania has justified green planning in Seattle and elsewhere, and yuppie envirophiles have encouraged industries to grow increasingly eco-friendly. But neither the technology nor the audience were available to the loon-cum-visionary in ’70s Arizona; Soleri was hawking Computer Shopper subscriptions in a typewriter universe.

“There’s a philosophical difference between then and now: Arcosanti was a reactionary way of living,” says Rafael Garcia, a senior project manager on the Savannah (Georgia) River Landing — a green space in the nation’s oldest planned community. “The new plans [for River Landing] are evolutionary, taking some that is there and using it to form what will be there. While Arcosanti was abandoning what was there to try something new, we’re building on what works, rather than on ideals that maybe weren’t there.”

Ave Maria, Florida

Can you mobilize a market that may or may not exist?

The planners and handlers of Ave Maria, Florida, want to make one thing clear: They have not spent years building Catholictown. “That is a major misconception,” says Dolly Roberts, spokesperson for the burgeoning town that has been widely reported as a haven for conservative Catholics. “The town has been designed as a ‘hometown for the 21st century.’ The religious bent is an illogical conclusion.”

It seems more than a marketing misunderstanding, though. After his conversion, the town’s benefactor, Domino’s Pizza magnate Thomas Monaghan, gave up an MTV Cribs lifestyle and seeded Ave Maria University to serve as the centerpiece of this proposed town. In 2006, Monaghan said to the Boston Men’s Catholic Conference that his town would follow Catholic canon law, banning the sale of pornography and contraception (statements he has since withdrawn). The town was even rumored to have a diagonal street that would capture the sunrise and sunset perfectly on August 15, the feast of its namesake’s Assumption. Vice President of Barron Collier, Blake Gable, responds, “We don’t have that.”

“All of that — the church at the center of town, the diagonal street, the statements made by Monaghan — is designed in such a way that the people most likely to move there are conservative Catholics, or at least people who have values that align with conservative Catholics,” says Kenneth Roemer, a professor specializing in utopian literature at the University of Texas, Arlington (UTA). “It would be pretty hard for an atheist to go to a place like that.”

What interests Roemer most, however, is not that Ave Maria appeals to Catholics and the like-minded, but how it does so. “My biggest question is this: Can you, in effect, create an instantaneous community? Can you impose a type of community on the land?” he asks. “[Towns] that build a sense of real strong community based on certain beliefs, either the community is already there or they come together and go seek a piece of land, like the Mormons.  In those ways, communities evolve.”

Even if Ave Maria initially succeeds, Roemer wonders how it will stand up after Monaghan is gone. The professor cites Oneida, New York, a town that thrived under the religious authority of John Humphrey Noyes (who also happened to be a silverware mogul), only to shrivel as a religious community after the passing of its charismatic leader.

“In these situations, once the really powerful leader, the authority, is no longer there, many communities fold or go through radical changes,” he says. “For now, I mean, it’s no Disneyland, but God and a billionaire are pretty good for authority.”

Celebration, Florida

When the market gets priced out

Like Roemer says, as authorities go, it’s tough to beat Disneyland. Replete with salmon-hued streets, Celebration, Florida, is the Mouse House’s emulation of Everytown, stimulating more interest and opining than any other American utopia. Characterizations of the town range from the cheerfully leery (those pan-ethnic automatons from “It’s a Small World” come to life) to the terrified (what might have happened if Karl Marx sprung a tail?).

“One of the most interesting things in Celebration is the incredibly high level of control that is exercised over the environment — what you are allowed to plant, what kinds of pets you can have, the color of the draperies and facades,” says Raphael Fischler of McGill’s School of Urban Planning. “It is interesting to see the extent to which people are willing to trade loss of freedom for certainty that their environment will be maintained according to some standards.”

The softball critique of New Urbanism as a whole — that making a community walkable does not inherently gestate authentic street life — applies to Celebration because, unlike the Fantasyland boat ride, its denizens are decidedly monochromatic.

“I think you succeed in creating an authentic street life. It may not be the same as walking down the streets of Chicago, per se,” says Yockey, who spent weeks in the toon town researching her book. “I think it depends on how you define diversity: We were in Celebration talking to Larry and Terry, and they answered, in unison, that the town is and is not diverse. There are a mix of people from different cultures, but that mix is predominantly Caucasian and pretty well-off.”

The gourmet-tablecloth color palette — and analogous economic variety — wasn’t the plan for Disneyville, though. The town’s mixed-use structures originally included rental properties offered at downright cheap, Osceola County market rates: $300 a month.

“There was such a demand for housing in the town that those were converted into and sold as condos,” Yockey says. “Diversity, in the sense of income level, is lost. It’s been priced out of the market.”

Industry City, California

Sensible?  Or senseless?

“Usually the assumption about American utopias is that they’re inherently socialist,” says UTA’s Roemer. “But there is a long history of capitalist utopias. In fact,” he says, “this is the 50th anniversary of one of the most important: Atlas Shrugged” — Ayn Rand’s Objectivist tome, in which inventors, artists, scientists and other innovators abandon a society they believe cheapens their profits and dignity.

Outside literary history, however, most planned communities involve religious or moral stances, or eschew conveniences, technology and commerce. Which is why Industry, California, doesn’t seem like utopia: It embraces all that stuff. The city just seems to make sense, rather than to reflect a rabid, one-sided sensibility.

Examine the city’s design more closely, though, and it becomes clear that Industry is more Ayn Rand than just Republican. It was conceived in reaction to emerging urban conditions — in particular, to prevent surrounding cities from annexing industrial land to put up condos. And it operates under non-traditional economic strata for the benefit of its target denizens: Rather than charging business taxes, the town is largely funded by sales tax at in-town shopping centers. Industry’s citizens aren’t people, however; they’re businesses. More than 90 percent of the city is zoned industrial, and while Census data lists the population under 800, the city houses about that many businesses.