Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of the West of England, Bristol
Beyond Utopia
Beyond Utopia was the final output of an AHRC-funded research-through-practice project ‘Planning for Utopia’ (2006-08) for which Mosley was the principal investigator. It explored the critical and speculative potential of the utopian architectural imagination in relation to the reality of contemporary urban development. Mosley and Warren’s screenplay, the major component in the collection, is informed by an understanding of utopia as a discursive tool rather than a realisable vision, as developed through the work of Fredric Jameson and Louis Marin. The screenplay, for a film never intended to be made, restages the processes through which a utopian architectural proposal for a real site in London was subjected to the scrutiny of the actual institutions of planning and development, thereby acting as a form of playful provocation that creates a productive dialogue between the real and the fictional.
The collection itself brings together essays by a range of academics, artists and writers from various fields who were invited to respond to the ideas raised in the screenplay. The collection thus created a space for multiple voices to come together in order to speculate further on the role of utopian imagination in urban planning. Through its ideas and innovative form, Beyond Utopia contributes to interdisciplinary research that explores the connections and disconnections between dialogic art practice, the field of speculative architecture, utopian discourse and accounts of urban planning and development. The collection forms part of the ‘Surface Tension Supplement’ series that focuses on contemporary spatial and sited research and practice.
The project led to invited presentations at: ‘Initiative versus Institution’ symposium at London Metropolitan University (2008)); ‘The Right to the City’ symposium at the University of Sydney (2011); ‘Architecture and Philosophy’ lecture series at RMIT, Melbourne (2011); and a peer-reviewed paper presented at ‘Peripheries’, AHRA conference Queens University, Belfast (2011).
