How the Ideal City knowledge resource is accessed

 The Ideal City has always been a kind of quest, equivalent to the search for the precious object or knowledge of sacred and mythic narrative. Inspiration and insight pushes and guides the searcher to travel beyond what they know or expect. For that reason the web-page component of the Ideal City knowledge resource is first entered through a series of sites linked to a thematic bibliography of activities which invite and enliven the process of data search. These sites, or keyed learning choices, are formatted on the most famous early illustration of Thomas Moore's island of Utopia (Splash Page 1). We move from one leg of our voyage, preparatory to other mental journeys, like the person shown standing on the deck of the sailing ship in the foreground. The figure of ship and traveler represent the dynamic of ideas to change viewpoint and context - and the association of Ideal Cities with new technologies as much as nature. The island situated in the ocean fronting the imaginary mainland and occupied by a series of different habitations suggests the variety of Ideal Cities. Hidden in the schematically drawn scene are "Easter Eggs", linked to quotations or images showing aspects of the Ideal City.

The categories of the Ideal City theorized in this paper are keyed to the island towns; the larger town on the mainland is linked to the next web-page (Splash Page II, The Architecture of the Ideal City Literature Review). These categories try to capture the range of types of idealized cities, beginning with the broad concept of the Ideal City but distinguishing the Dream City, Lost City, Dystopic City, Lived City, Virtual City and 21 st Century City and Habitations. Capable of including other sub-types, the format also has links to two compelling attributes of the Ideal City. One is its persuasive and often poetic language: Wording the City. The other its potential to generate widely accessible interactive computer games: Virtual City. As the Canadian theorist and thinker Marshall McLuhan declared in his unpublished essay "The Future of Art", written in 1979 and now among his papers at the National Archives of Canada, "with electric circuitry the trend in education is from instruction to discovery."

Splash Page II substitutes temporal for spatial aspects. The thematic organization of the large bibliography on the Ideal City is formatted onto the central section of Piero della Francesca's painting of an Ideal Renaissance City. Its circular, tholos, plan, and classical ornament recall Plato's description of the concentric Atlantis and the recurrence of the Ideal City vision in western tradition stemming from its ancient Classical and Judeo-Christian origins. The total bibliographic resource, listed chronologically and alphabetically, is accessed via the marble paved foundation platform. That bibliography can then be retrieved in a geo-cultural matrix linked to each of the columns of the building: Americas, Africa/Oceania, Europe, Arctic, Asia, Middle Eastern. The main entrance leads to those bibliographies, web pages and comparable compendia of information on ideal, actual and represented cities. The lower windows link to major texts of utopian human settlement and themes within or about the imaginary and real city. They also enable exploration of the philosophical-theological sources and the technique-training built into and built from Ideal City planning. The horizontal entablature atop the windows and columns log onto the discussion of utopian writing and creating. The smaller windows in the upper section are keyed to the discourse associated with or emanating from the Ideal City, and to important related economic and cultural factors. The conical roof and lantern provide access to readings on both the representation and realization of the Ideal City. The doorway of the temple-like church in the right background invites viewing of the extensive image and plan record of the Ideal City.

That figurative architecture of the written and imaged Ideal City is connected to five other web pages. These draw out materials from the bibliography that explore various conceptual aspects. Each also carries over excerpts from the wording of (Ideal) City, exemplified by William Blake's impassioned advocacy of the empowering and liberating capability of human imagination. Splash Page III (Formal Plans and Schemes for Ideal Cities) has images of imagination's power to summon new urban settlement - from the circular and angled plans originating in the writings of Plato or Vitruvius, to the contained and monumental urban grids of Moll or Le Corbusier, contrasted with the organic and anarchic plans of Lloyd Wright or Constant Nieuwenhuys. Splash Page IV (Force of Ideas) has an array of imaginary and actual urban plans and places that further illustrate the force of ideal or abstract idea. These deliberately include the relation of human with civic form as expressed in William Shakespeare's telling question, "What is the City but the People?" Additionally these purposely introduce existing American and Asian alongside European settlement. The whole set underscores how much ideas effect the everyday environment of our lives.

The comparison between the thought-up and built-up continues through the following three pages Splash Pages, V-VII. The first (V, Ideal Plans versus Realized Plans) contrasts idealized with realized town plans as exemplified by 17 th and 20 th century planning of Beijing, by Ledoux's late 18 th century schemes for the salt-works at Arc et Senans and his imaginary town of Chaux, or by the ancient Arabian city of Ubar and the modern-day ideal community of Auroville in India. Among them is also a visualization of the proposed International Space Station. The Station demonstrates the continuation of ideal planning into science fiction, being a quasi utopia of universal human habitation at a remote location attainable but far distant. This leads onto Splash Page VI (Utopia/Dystopia as a Dynamic), illustrating modern high technology city projects. Exemplified by Ludwig Hilberseimer's 1928 Berlin Development Plan or Leonard Marsh's 1949-1950 Strathcona Redevelopment Scheme for Vancouver; these were intended to institute practical improvement in daily city living especially for low income citizens. Some of the difficulties confronted by the less privileged are structured into computer games like Sim City 3000. But such disparities are more fully investigated in the fictional and cinematic depiction of later industrial-age popular culture. Witness Fritz Lang's 1926 film Metropolis, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), or Margaret Atwood's dystopic novel Oryx and Crake (2003). Splash Page VII (Rationalist or Organic) returns to the core proposition: that the Ideal always interacts with the Real City. It highlights the two dominant paradigms of the concentrated high-rise cities of Ferris, Le Corbusier, Metabolists or promoters of Metacity/Datatown versus the dispersed garden city invented by Ebenezer Howard. Their legacies resonate across Canada, including those many planned company towns typified by the lofty vision but more mundane reality of Kitimat developed in northern British Columbia from 1952. Adding another dimension to the quest for understanding, the final page, Splash Page VIII (Discourses of Ideal City), offers a completely different analytic. This mobilizes the spirit of Felix Guattari's provocative statement, "Rather than looking for some stupefying and infantilizing consensus, it will be a question in the future of cultivating disensus." Consequently Joseph Gandy's 1820 circular plan for a village made up of circular workers' houses provides a re-configurative schema for accessing the knowledge resource. In this schema the various themes now centre on consideration of what has been created by the Ideal City rather than its creation.