To the countryside… or into outer space? 1970s utopias about escaping the city

Between the 1970s and 1980s, factors such as pollution, climate change, resource depletion, and population growth triggered an alarm bell: scientists and researchers understood for the first time that cities would have soon become an inhospitable, almost unlivable place. The introduction of new production systems and innovative communication technologies, especially in the United States, brought multidisciplinary groups and established professionals to elaborate hypothesis of suburban and even spatial development, which shaped up to be rather utopian alternative paradigms to the condition of urban distress. 

In the 1970s, when many families had started leaving big cities to move towards more rural areas and reconnect with nature, a team of architects, engineers, and biologists based in the San Francisco Bay area proposed to reverse this trend by turning cities into environmentally stable and healthy places. So, a multidisciplinary group consisting of Sim Van der Ryn, Bill and Helga Olkowski, Tom Javits and the Farallones Institute patented at Berkeley the Integral Urban House, a demonstration house built following the optimism and euphoria for sustainable technologies of the time. The experimental house materialized an attempt to transplant the suburban way of life into an urban context, injecting, in this way, an environmental awareness in the city’s domestic life. The house was equipped with unique ecological devices, like a compost toilet, a hive, and a freshwater pond; in addition, this type of homes had numerous mechanical contraptions to produce electric energy. Unfortunately, the building – an old Victorian cottage turned into an urban farm – soon became a noisy and deafening machine that aroused the neighbors’ fury. So, the experiment of creating a hybrid of urban and suburban habits failed.

Later, in 1980, the author Alvin Toffler foreshadowed a “third wave” of communication system development, characterized by new technologies that would overcome space-time barriers. In his book The Third Wave, Toffler insightfully identified the direction in which interconnection and distance communication would change. Anticipating the digital revolution, Toffler argued that production systems based on the new information technologies would relocate workers from the offices to their respective houses, which would become electronic cottages. The American futurologist suggested a new and systematic reflection on homes, intended as a place of residence as well as work and leisure. This domestic utopia would cause a transformation in all sectors. According to Toffler, working remotely would reduce the time spent commuting and allow small businesses to open in suburban or rural areas. Reducing travelling would also dimmish the use of resources which will make Toffler’s an appealing hypothesis both in economic terms and in regards of improving the quality of life in the suburbs, while at the same time going towards a beneficial direction for the economy, urban design, and social vision. With time, this change would stabilize small communities and reinvigorate the concept of civitas, whether virtual or real.

For Toffler, the electronic cottage was not as claustrophobic as our homes became during the current Covid-19 pandemic, but on the contrary, it was a means to liberate people from the slavery of commuting. The recent structural change in the organization of work due to the spread of remote working seems to bring workers towards Toffler’s vision. However, despite the powerful injections of communication technologies we undergo every day, today the relationship between urban and suburban spaces is still not optimized and lacks adequate infrastructures; the electronic cottage is still a privilege of a few.

The last alternative paradigm to the condition of urban distress is provided by the scientist and Princeton Physics professor Gerard K. O’Neill in the 1970s, with a development hypothesis destined to gain followers in more recent times. The idea of building human colonies in space could sound just like a sci-fi rant, but in his book, The High Frontier (1976), O’Neill managed to explain in the smallest details – also thanks to Don Davis’s illustrations − how to program, launch and design an entire spatial feat. According to him, the exponential population growth would create an urban and global congestion, high unemployment rate, and an unprecedented conflict between industrial efficiency and environmental protection. For him, the settlement of space was essentially a response to the limited amount of economic resources to which humans cannot renounce present on Earth. For this reason, the only possible alternative seemed to be that of sourcing low-cost and unlimited energies from outside planet Earth.

The space habitats O’Neill aimed for had privileged, even idyllic, living conditions that recreated terrestrial suburban environments with very low population density and abundant green areas. But despite the detailed design of all operations – from habitat configuration to solutions to optimize agricultural production, from the mass launchers design that sent materials into space to space means of transportation – O’Neill himself admits that “the exploration and the settlement of space is no more than a ‘technological fix’ for problems that should be solved on a higher, more intellectual plane.”

In those years, even the renowned economist Robert Heilbroner was studying the consequences of limited energies and raw materials on Earth and in the conclusions of his book The Human Prospect, he wondered whether coping with the challenges of the future without paying a scary price was possible. For Heilbroner there was no hope. The pessimism of the economist was followed by that of the O’Neill. When asked if the space community would have been “free from conflicts, free from suffering, and free from sadness,” the scientist replied, “certainly not, if they are human.”

Nevertheless today, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Elon Musk, SpaceX tycoon and founder of Tesla, are trying to pursue their plans of space colonization, precisely influenced by Gerard O’Neill’s book. The reason behind their plan – transferring the heavy industry to the Moon? Conduct space tourism operation? Transforming Mars into a colony for the top 1%? – is still not fully clear, but in a period of decolonization, so to speak, people fear that such feats could become a colossal waste of capital, resources that could be destined to alleviate some of the more or less evident terrestrial sufferings.