Utopia, food and the radical traditionDr Susan ParhamHead of Urbanism, Academic Director, International Garden City InstituteUniversity of Hertfordshire

Food at heart of arguably utopian ideas about Edenic landscapes and lives - from the forbidden apple of Christianity to the Paradise gardens of the Islamic tradition

19th century saw a flowering of utopian ideas Range of radical political, economic and gender based critiques of current economic, political and cultural systems Work of Bellamy, Marx and Engels (among other) radical economic and political theories were highly influentialMany of these ideas represented in theoretical and literary ways but also in practical schemes in UK, USA and elsewhere Expressed in design and planning from the scale of the dwelling to the whole town Design for food production and consumption at the centre of more democratic, egalitarian, socialised and collective built form and urban/peri-urban landscapes

In the 19th and early 20th centuries developed a particularly rich history of utopian relationships to food – within a strongly radical political economy:

- Robert Owen at New Lanark and the ‘Owenites’- Charles Fourier’s Phalanstere/gastrosophy - and the Fourierists/ Associationists in the USA- Jean-Baptiste André Godin (1817 –1888) Familistère at Guise- The socialising design and planning of food by the ‘material feminists’ including Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The development of food focused garden cities along lines proposed by Ebenezer Howard

Proposal for Owen’s ‘New Harmony’

Fourier’s phalansterie (or Phalanstery) was widely influential on utopian thinking and actual settlement planning among utopians – food production and consumption was to be socialised and communal

Fourier formulated idea of ‘gastrosophy’ (in contrast to the bourgeoisie gastronomy) which ‘encapsulated a complete understanding of food production, cookery, and health, using all of these to make the world a better place by pleasurably and harmlessly realizing one’s own desires and sharing them with others…gastrosophy is often skipped over as a frivolous diversion in his work, [but] Fourier deliberately chose it as a wittily accessible means of both encapsulating his fully realized vision of Harmony and utterly refuting the emerging market-led model of society exemplified by Parisian gastronomy.’ (Levi, 2015)

Influenced by Fourier, Jean-Baptiste André Godin’s Familistère at Guise in Picardy included collective kitchens and community dining rooms – also widely influential as practical example of ‘industrial utopianism’ with collective food aspects

Fourier inspired about 30 phalanxes in USA over 19th century

Fourierists such as Albert Brisbane, and Owen at New Harmony in Indiana (from 1825)tried put his ideas into practice

Utopian Associationists settlements in USA including Bronson Alcott’s communal but ascetic ‘Fruitlands’ in which food prohibitions featured heavily

Communal kitchens and dining rooms were often a feature as was a focus on rural production of own food

New Moral World, successor to New Harmony

The phalansterie

Oneida Perfectionists (founded by John Humphrey Noyes, 1848 in Oneida, New York) practiced ‘communalism’ and something they called ‘complex marriage’ - and created a Mansion house included communal dining and kitchen space

Amana Inspirationists communities in Iowa from around 1856 drawn from Swiss German immigrants – and similar Hutterian communities also emerged – again with focus on farming, communal food arrangements – in each Amana community 8-10 Amana women worked in ‘Kuchenbas’ – kitchen houses which became social hubs

The ‘material feminists’ proposed socialising design and planning of food - driven by desire to free women from arduous domestic labour but also recognise and reward its importance to society - their stories and design proposals for food retrieved by Dolores Hayden (1982)

In this departed from the radical analysis of the Marx/Engels who saw gender as secondary to class

Advocates like Charlotte Perkins Gilman proposed freeing women from domestic drudgery – various material feminists designed utopias which represented range of architectures and plans for re-ordering society

Food and domestic labour central to the vision:

- entire settlements: urban, suburban and rural- ‘kitchenless’ apartments and cottages- communal/public kitchens and dining rooms- distribution of ready meals- use of labour saving devices developed for industrial and commercial settings

Included polemics like Melusina Fay Pierce’s (top right) and schemes like Howland’s Topolobampo (right)

These various strands of utopian thinking about food were influential:

Leonard Ladd’s 1890 improved dwelling houses in Phillidelphia with centralised kitchen and laundry (above)

Orson Squire Fowler (phrenologist, amateur architect, and head of a publishing empire) designed Octagon Houses which proposed by Henry Chubb as basis for a utopian Octogon City for vegetarian living in 1856 Kansas – unfortunately could not recruit enough vegetarians and had to allow meat eaters

King Camp Gillette’s Metropolis of 1894 was proposed to be built on Niagara Falls (to make use of hydropower) based on the utopian ideas of his book ‘The Human Drift’ – again food socialised – the town plan showed co-operative buildings – those marked C where food stored and prepared

In the UK, Garden City ideas proposed and developed by Ebenezer Howard and his followers had range of economic and spatial expressions of these utopian roots – yet in Howard’s terms highly practical.

Howard’s well thought through ideas operated at level of the whole settlement from food production to retail and consumption - farms, orchards, allotments, productive gardens- quadrangles design by Parker and Unwin- kitchenless/minimal kitchen houses- co-operative kitchens- shared dining rooms- vegetarianism, craft etc

5. Ambivalent suburbia

5. Ambivalent suburbia

Letchworth as first garden city to be built offered an urban laboratory for socialised domestic work in relation to food – a ‘haven for strange ideas and stranger people’ (reported in Miller, 1978)

Homegarth designed by H. Clapham Lander an early example in Letchworth of co-operative kitchen and dining arrangements in a quadrangle plan. Lander, however, complained about ‘all the cranks who want to live there” (Pearson, p96)

Another example was the Meadow Way Green cottages with communal dining room and kitchen – designed by Courtenay M Crickmer, built 1914 in a development promoted by Miss Pimm and Miss Dew through the Howard Cottage Society

Were a number of other examples at Letchworth, Welwyn and Hampstead Garden Suburb exploring aspects of socialised food preparation, cooking and dining.

Baillie Scott’s Waterlow Court designed for single women and Parker and Unwin’s ‘The Orchard’ co-operative flats for older people (both in Hampstead Garden Suburb) featured quadrangle based plans and some communal food space

Worth noting such socialised food arrangements had been advocated by William Morris and were being strongly argued for by HG Wells

Also happening in other parts of Europe about same period as start of garden cities – such as Otto Fick’s “Service House’ in Copenhagen of 1903

More recent representations of these radical collective utopian ideas including

- Cellular and Broadacre cities on rural blocks (USA)- Soviet era communal living, kitchens and dining (Dom Narkofin)- kibbutzim- communes- co-housing- cults?

Communal dining room in the Ein Haron kibbutz

The proposed ‘Ville Radieuse’ (after demolishing central Paris) utopian‘Corbusian’approaches to urban design and planning including for food based on spatial separation not socialisation

Corb did socialise food in his Unité d'habitation buildings in 1920s and 50s

But at town scale food pushed to margins, as played out in new town design – heren Harlow New Town, Essex, 1956

To finish with a question – what constitutes a continuation of the radical tradition in relation to utopias and food? In food terms do we need to move beyond 20th century utopian thinking – with its spatial nostalgia about a technocratic future – and rediscover some co-operative principles explored in the late 19th century – including those governing food in garden cities?

ReferencesArmytage, W. H. G. (2013). Heavens below: Utopian experiments in England, 1560-1960. Routledge.

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