Early Planning Utopias: A Feminist Critique

Title: Early Planning Utopias: A Feminist Critique
Authors: Dr Dorina Pojani, Dr Catherine Keys and Rory Little
Publisher: Anthem Press (2025)

There is little doubt that urban planning has historically failed women. To liberate the profession from patriarchal influences, it is necessary to revisit the preconceptions that shaped early efforts to design new cities or improve existing ones.

Early Planning Utopias critiques the work of 20 male planning luminaries who proposed urban models, interventions, and approaches on both sides of the North Atlantic during the Second Industrial Revolution. These early visions, often presented as emancipatory or utopian, set European and North American cities (as well as their colonial counterparts) on an inexorable masculinist path. The grand urban plans and projects of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were largely bankrolled by wealth extracted from colonial enterprises in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A reverence for geometry, order, and standardisation, alongside a monumental scale, reflected a hegemonic and monolithic vision of the city, with little tolerance for cultural or physical difference. Limitless urban growth and the rapid, effortless movement of people were valorised, and for the first time in history, roads became more important than homes.

The book also highlights the work of several female activists and reformers from the same era. Although these women rarely envisioned full-blown urban utopias or produced extensive writings on planning, they worked to improve built environments for all. Female reformers were more attuned to the lived experiences of city dwellers than male planners, architects, and engineers. Rather than expanding or clearing out the existing urban fabric, women sought to restore it. This book calls for a return to that planning philosophy, at a time when numerous techno utopias are being imagined and built, often backed by major private corporations or individual male billionaires.