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Mapping "Utopia": A Comment on the Geography of Sir Thomas MoreAuthor(s): Brian R. GoodeySource: Geographical Review, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Jan., 1970), pp. 15-30Published by: American Geographical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/213342Accessed: 28/08/2010 11:06

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MAPPING "UTOPIA"

A COMMENT ON THE GEOGRAPHY OF SIR THOMAS MORE*

BRIAN R. GOODEY

FROM the first excavations by the English Diggers in 1649 to the more recent activities of a similarly named group in San Francisco,' the world has periodically been dotted with Utopian communities. Some

have enjoyed several years of activity and have thereby earned dissection at the hands of academics; others have achieved much greater importance on

paper than they ever have on the soil. Most geographers have slight interest in even the largest or most persistent of these communities, but to me the

prototype "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More has posed an interesting problem. In search of some suitably nonexistent political unit on which to base a series of student activities, I turned to commentaries on More's work in the hope of finding a Utopian map, prepared by some student of Moreana. But after a

fairly exhaustive search of the literature it became apparent that no such map existed, despite the statistical and topographical description of Utopia provided by More in the early sections of Book Two. This brief study has

developed from an attempt to provide the required map.

THE BACKGROUND OF "UTOPIA"

The Latin first edition of More's "Utopia" appeared in 1516, published by Thierry Martins at Louvain (then in the Netherlands).2 An unauthorized

* The writer wishes to thank Bernard O'Kelly and Jackson Hershbell of the University of North Dakota for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

I The original Diggers were a small group of laborers who dug common land at Weybridge, England, on April 1, 1649. This action and their subsequent political activities are often regarded as the first efforts at practical Utopianism. See W. H. G. Armytage: Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560-1960 (Toronto, 1961). The Diggers of San Francisco were a group associated with the hippie colony there in the mid-196o's; they collected and redistributed clothing and other goods.

2 The first edition was entitled "De Optimo Reipublicae Statv deqve noua insula Vtopia libellus uere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festiuus, clarissimi disertissimique uir Thomae Mori inclytae ciutatis Londinensis ciuis & Vicecomitis" ["The Best State of a Commonwealth and the New Island of Utopia; A Truly Golden Handbook, No Less Beneficial than Entertaining, by the Distinguished and Eloquent Author Thomas More, Citizen and Sheriff of the Famous City of London"]. For a full list of editions, together with a bibliography of commentaries, see: Frank Sullivan and Majie Padberg Sullivan: Moreana, 1478-1945: A Preliminary Check List of Material by and about Saint Thomas More (Kansas City, Mo., 1946); and Reginald W. Gibson: St. Thomas More: A Preliminary Bibliography of His Works and of Moreana to the Year 1750 (New Haven, 1961), which has a bibliography of Utopiana compiled by Gibson and J. Max Patrick.

> MR. GOODEY is lecturer in the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Birmingham, England. Formerly he was on the faculty of the Department of Geography, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks.

THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

edition was published in Paris in 1517, and two editions were prepared in Basel the following year. Other Latin editions were quick to follow, from presses in Florence, Venice, Vienna, Cologne, Wittenberg, Frankfurt, Han- over, Milan, Amsterdam, Oxford, London, Glasgow, and Berlin. The book achieved a high reputation among humanistic scholars of the Renaissance

period, and letters of comment by the Dutchman, Busleyden, and by the French classicist, Bude, were included in the Basel editions.

The first English translation, by Ralph Robinson, was published in London in 1551 under the title: "A fruteful and Pleasaunt Worke of the Best State of a Publique weale, and of the Newe Yle called Utopia: Written in Latine by Syr Thomas More Knyght, and Translated into Englyshe by Ralphe Robynson Citizein and Goldsmythe of London, at the Procurement and Earnest Request of George Tadlowe Citizein and Haberdassher of the Same Citie." A second, corrected, edition of this English translation appeared in 1556, and other early English editions date from 1597 and 1624. Texts used in the preparation of the present paper were the Lumby second edition of

1883 and the Yale St. Thomas More Project editions of 1964 and 1965.3 More's "Utopia" is in two parts. The first comprises a discussion of the

social problems evident in early sixteenth-century England; the second contains a detailed description of the imaginary hedonistic and communistic

society called Utopia-literally, "Nowhere." Utopia is an island4 in the New World, formerly called Abraxa but renamed after its capture by Prince

Utopus. The geographical and societal descriptions of the island are delivered

through the mouth of Raphael Hythlodaeus, a Portuguese traveler who had

supposedly sailed with Amerigo Vespucci on his last three voyages to the New World.

Although "Utopia" is remembered chiefly as a description of an imagin- ary ideal, it was largely conceived as a criticism of political and social patterns in contemporary Europe. Many topical events, including the Vespucci discoveries, are specifically mentioned, and it is likely that the concept of

3J. Rawson Lumby, edit.: Utopia (Cambridge, 1883); Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter, edits.: The

Complete Works of St. Thomas More: Volume 4, Utopia (New Haven, 1965). The text of this latter

work is also included in a paperback edition, Edward Surtz (edit.): St. Thomas More: Utopia (New

Haven, 1964). 4 The island unit as a utopian territory was a feature of several other Renaissance studies and has

since been the focus of descriptions by authors ranging from Defoe to Aldous Huxley. As Yi-Fu Tuan

has noted, "The view of the island as Eden, evoking nostalgia for lost innocence, has an enduring place in the Western mind" (Yi-Fu Tuan: Attitudes toward Environment: Themes and Approaches, in

Environmental Perception and Behavior (edited by David Lowenthal; Univ. of Chicago, Dept. of Geogr. Research Paper No. 109, 1967, pp. 4-17; reference on p. 14).

16

MAPPING UTOPIA

Utopia is based on ideas about the communal social structures of American

empires, which were gradually becoming known at that time. Vespucci's accounts had been published in 1507, and his letters were published in Florence only a few months before the first edition of "Utopia" was made available. "Utopia" consists of a subtle blend of the ideal and the actual. This

jigsaw of fact and fiction has provided many interesting hours for the students of literature, and at the time of its publication the protective fictions that surrounded the factual details may well have provided a slight barrier to the

primitive censorship of the period. But to the modem geographer the juxta- position of actual geographical distances with idealized and imaginary pat- terns poses many problems.

"Utopia" was written in the context of similar works by several other

European authors, but it was More's description that gained the most at- tention in the centuries that followed. The concept of a garden city with a craft economy, the opposition to war, and the unadorned religion of Utopia were adopted by successive groups of "Utopians" in both the Old World and the New. It was a book of humanistic hope, describing a society that had

seemingly taken the best from the Greeks and the Romans, from the Dutch and the Hanseatic cities, from the Swiss Confederation, and from Venice. The influence of Plato's "Republic," of Aristotle's "Politics," of St. Augus- tine's "De Civitate Dei," and of St. Thomas Aquinas's "Commentary on Politics"s are found in the writing; for More appears to have been impressed with these works. Important too were contemporary influences, such as More's friend Erasmus, who supervised the first printing of the work.6

Although More may have borrowed some small points, the composition was his own. Ideas for the book had been forming in his mind for several years, and Book Two was almost certainly written in 1515, during the lengthy negotiations between the English and the Dutch over the resumption of normal trade relations. More was a member of this negotiating group.

Although much more could be said concerning the intellectual milieu in which the book was created, and the sources from which it stemmed, these facts can be ascertained from a number of commentaries. But there is really

5 For example, the comments on urban sites and fortifications in More's "Utopia" and in the "Commentary on Politics" are similar (P. Albert Duhamel: Medievalism of More's "Utopia," Studies in Philology, Vol. 52, 1955, pp. 99-126; reference on p. o18).

6 For detailed comment on More's sources and influences see the introductory chapters of Surtz and Hexter, op. cit. [see footnote 3 above], and Russell A. Ames: Citizen Thomas More and His Utopia (Princeton, N. J., 1949), p. 5o. Proctor Fenn Sherwin: Some Sources of More's Utopia, Univ. of New Mexico, Bull. No. 88, 1917, and Henry W. Donner: Introduction to Utopia (London, 1946), are also of value.

17

THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

no substitute for reading "Utopia" itself; written more than four hundred and fifty years ago, the book is still full of ideas that are applicable to modem societies.7

THE UTOPIAN ISLAND

"Utopia" was not written as a geography. The locale of More's society is almost incidental to the social structure that he describes, and as a result the maps included in the present paper are based on only a few sections of

description. As Surtz suggests,8 a better title for the popular editions of the book might have been "The Best State of a Commonwealth"; for much of the work does not rely on the geography of the imaginary state of Utopia for its effect.

Following the marginal glosses that were added to More's manuscript by Erasmus,9 and that are included in the Lumby edition, we learn certain facts

concerning the "sice and fasion of the newe ylande Utopia."I? More states that at its broadest the island was two hundred miles wide. It was not much narrower throughout its length, but tapered toward the ends. The extremi- ties almost formed a circle, five hundred miles in circumference. This gave the island the image of a moon, the tips of which were separated by a strait eleven miles wide. At the heart of the island, protected by the encircling land, was a large, placid bay that facilitated marine communication between the

opposing horns. The strait, which was dotted with reefs and shallows, was dominated by a central crag on which a watchtower had been constructed. The marginal gloss emphasizes that such "a place naturally fenced nedeth but one garrison.""I Utopian pilots were required for the journey through the

protected narrows, and for guidance they used landmarks that were easily relocated in times of conflict (the gloss notes "a politique devise in the chaung- ing of land markes").s2 The outside "utter circuite"'3 of the island had many well-defended harbors, some naturally protected and some with man-made fortifications. The island was once connected to the mainland, but the Utopi-

7 Lewis Mumford has given Utopia considerable attention in his studies on urbanism: in an early book, "The Story of Utopias" (New York, 1922), he includes a chapter on More's work and integrates the proposal with others, from Plato's "Republic" through to the writings of H. G. Wells.

8 Surtz, op. cit. [see footnote 3 above], p. xxii. 9 Justification of Erasmus's authorship of these glosses is contained in J. H. Hexter: More's Utopia:

The Biography of an Idea (Princeton, N. J., 1962), p. 44. '0 Lumby, op. cit. [see footnote 3 above], p. 67, line lo. I Ibid., p. 68, line 6.

12 Ibid., line 15. '3 Ibid., lines 18-19.

18

MAPPING UTOPIA

an founder had "caused xv myles of uplandyshe grounds, where the sea had no passage to be cut and dygged up."'4 The removal of this section of land had created the Utopian Island, but it is not clear whether this fifteen miles referred to the length or to the width of the constructed waterway.

From the initial description of Utopia, the reader is immediately struck by parallels with the geography of the British Isles. This was a point em- phasized by Erasmus, who indicated that it was More's intention to base some of his designs upon his homeland.'s The two-hundred-mile width of Utopia was noted as equivalent to the breadth of England in the Saint Albans Chronicle, published in 1515,,6 and on the modem map a line of approxi- mately two hundred miles runs from the Norfolk coast of East Anglia to the northern part of the English border with Wales. The figure of five hundred miles, the circumference of Utopia, has a less accurate parallel; forEngland is about 400 miles long (Berwick-on-Tweed to Lands End). The Utopian dimensions are undoubtedly based on the English model, but the crescent shape is, of course, a fantasy.

Guarded river and bay entrances were certainly known to the author, and the remains of coastal castles similar to those described as defending Utopia may be seen on the British and European coasts today. Another point of

comparison between Utopia and Britain is the fifteen-mile channel between the island and the mainland, though the shortest distance between England and France today is twenty-one miles, and this distance would appear to have

changed little since More's time. The idea of a Utopian channel is almost

certainly derived from the English Channel, of which More had extensive

experience on his several continental journeys. Britain's physical detachment from continental Europe took a long time

to accomplish, and there was obviously no chronicler to document it, but of the construction of the Utopian Channel we learn that with all hands to the task it was "with exedinge marvelous spede dispatched."'7 The defensive

qualities of the new channel were uppermost in the eyes of its creator, though the potentials for a trade route were not neglected. Mackinder no doubt reechoed More's thoughts when he noted of the English Channel and its

I4 Ibid., lines 31-33. Is p. S. Allen and others, edits.: Opus epistolarum Des Erasmi Roterodami, Vol. 4 (Oxford, 1958),

p. 21. This comparison is evaluated by Gerhard Ritter: The Corrupting Influence of Power (translated by F. W. Pick; Hadleigh, 1952), pp. 46-89.

I6 "The Descrypcon of Englande" is included at the end of "Cronycle of Englande . .. by one sometyme scole mayster of St. Albans" (London, 1515).

17 Lumby, op. cit. [see footnote 3 above], p. 59, lines 6-7.

19

THE CONTINENT

? '.' '

Amaurotum '..+.. ,: : : :~?:?. . .:? ' ~ .?.*: ?' . .? . ...>. -~~~~~~~~~~~~~~:???~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~,*.,'. ?~;?? ?.:'

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FIG. 1 (left)-Map of Utopia based on the woodcut of 1518, a foreshortened

pictogram with urban elevations. Here the urban areas are represented by shading. FIG. 2 (above)-This outline represents one possible form for Utopia. Here the

circumference of 500 miles is preserved and the broadest width, 200 miles, is lost.

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MAPPING UTOPIA

North Sea extension: "The Narrow Seas are the strong natural frontier of Britain, but at all times they have been freely traversed, and the islanders have been neighboured by the peoples of the opposite shores. For some purposes, at any rate, those opposite shores are the true frontiers of Britain, and no ac- count of the island realm would be complete which ignored their charac- teristics."I8

Two of the early editions of "Utopia" included woodcuts of oblique map views of the island. In the 1516 Louvain edition, "the reverse of the title

page has the sketch of the island of Utopia, much plainer and better con- formed to the text than that in [the] 1518" Basel editions.'9 The ornate view of the island and neighboring coastline in the Basel text is by Ambrosius Holbein; the artist responsible for the 1516 cut is not known.20 An outline of the island form suggested in both illustrations is shown in Figure 1.

Although the Holbein map is resplendent with views of Germanic cities, it gives little help to the would-be Utopian cartographer. The fifteen-mile channel is irregular, and it appears rather that Utopia is set at the mouth of a mainland bay. The island is far from being crescent shaped, and though the structure marked "X" in Figure 1 may be the watchtower guarding the strait, the interior bay appears to be absent. With so many discrepancies be- tween text and contemporary map, we may well ask why the artist did not

attempt a closer reproduction of the design set by More. The answer is unfortunately all too simple. More presents us with a

Utopia, a "Nowhere," that cannot be mapped. A circle with a circumference of five hundred miles cannot contain a diameter of two hundred miles. To

preserve the important moon shape and the interior bay, the figure of two hundred must be forgotten, yet it is the most accurate of the references derived from the British Isles. Figure 2 is a view of Utopia that neglects the two hundred mile breadth in order to preserve the shape. But any map based on these figures proves to be even more inaccurate when an attempt is made to include the suggested internal divisions.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF UTOPIA

More's island contained fifty-four "large and faire cities, or shiere towns," which Surtz translates as "city-states."2I Each was similar in social structure

18 Sir Halford J. Mackinder: Britain and the British Seas (2nd edit.; Oxford, 1925), p. 17. 19 Surtz and Hexter, op. cit. [see footnote 3 above], p. clxxxiv. 20 Ibid., pp. 276-277. The authors suggest possible artists for the 1516 illustrations and include both

cuts on pp. 16-17. 21 Lumby, op. cit. [see footnote 3 above], p. 69, lines 1o-1l; Surtz, op. cit. [see footnote 3 above],

p. 61.

21

THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

and, so far as terrain permitted, in urban regional structures; the marginal gloss notes that "similitude causeth concorde."'22 These cities were at least twenty-four miles from one another, but each was close enough to its neigh- bors to be reached on foot in one day. From the cartographic point of view, the construction of the internal political divisions of Utopia is again difficult; for without an accurate island form there is little value in performing the operation. After several attempts to incorporate More's distance criteria into various models of the island, I abandoned the task.

The city regions, or city states, formed the basis of the island's political structure, a loose confederation of units on the Greek model. The number fifty-four, allocated as the number of urban regions, was probably derived from the administrative units into which England was divided in More's time. In the mid-sixteenth century there were fifty-three county-level units, together with the City of London. In More's scheme each city was sur- rounded by a circle of rural land at least twelve miles in width.23 These inflexible green belts were dotted with "shiere houses or fermes builded, well appointed and furnyshed with all sorts of instruments and tooles belongynge to husbandrye."24 Each rural settlement had no fewer than

forty adult workers, together with two "bondmen," or serfs, and an elder master and mistress, that is, at least forty-four adults. Groups of thirty households (1320 or more adult persons) were ruled by a phylarch, whose title was derived from the name given to Greek tribal leaders. The rural population rotated; annually twenty persons from each household returned to the city after two years of service and were replaced by city dwellers.

The economy appeared to be largely agricultural. Among the features noted were poultry raising with incubation methods ("a straunge fassion in hatchinge and bringing up of pulleyne"25), oxen maintained for draft, grain planted for bread, and wine, cider, and berry production. Honey and licorice for flavoring water were found in abundance. The annual harvest was ac- complished in one day with the aid of a drafted body of city dwellers. Urban and rural products were exchanged, but there was no system of barter or payment. The islanders also traded rural products for iron, which was much

22 Lumby, op. cit. [see footnote 3 above], p. 69, line 14. 23 In the Lumby edition this figure is given as "xx," as derived from the 1517 edition; the "twelve"

of the 1516 edition is undoubtedly correct, as it agrees with the twenty-four mile average distance be- tween cities. See Lumby, op. cit. [see footnote 3 above], p. 69, line 28, and Surtz and Hexter, op. cit.[see footnote 3 above], p. 388, note 112-29.

24 Lumby, op. cit. [see footnote 3 above], p. 70, lines 2-5. 25 Ibid., p. 71, line 5.

22

MAPPING UTOPIA

needed and held as gold by the people. We are not given the total population of each green-belt region or the number of settlements in each area, but a fairly clear image of the landscape emerges nonetheless.

In many respects the political units represented re-creations of the classical Greek city states. By idealizing the Greek examples and drawing on philosophical proposals of that period, rural and urban societies were fully integrated by the system of rotating labor groups, and the green belt was truly a garden for each city. Even the colonizing activities of the Greeks were repeated; for when Utopian units exceeded a suitable population, colonies were established elsewhere. The Utopian scheme was not only a reflection of a classical Greek pattern, however, it also expressed a hope for the con- temporary European scene.

The conflicts between rival urban centers were well known to More, and his Utopian plan for fixed sociopolitical units was perhaps an attempt to re- move such rivalry. But the spacing of urban centers was not drawn from his surroundings; for by More's time the cities and towns in England produced a much denser point pattern than he advocated. With reference to East Anglia, Dickinson notes that "the maximum range of influence of the medieval market was about six miles; indeed, it is still illegal, in accordance with an old law, to establish a market within six and two-thirds miles of an existing legal market. The actual market area, however, rarely reached this limit, and varied considerably according to local conditions."26 Although there was much in the intense market competition of the more fertile rural areas of England that More may have wished to eradicate in his society, the form of his economic landscape was not dictated by the rivalries of market centers, but rather by a harmony between town and country. The division of Utopia into urban regions of similar size and with similar services stands as a pointed reminder to modern local government reformers. It is interesting to note that although little has changed in the English administrative pattern since More's time, modem suggestions for change include a system of divisions akin to that advocated in Utopia.27

26 Robert E. Dickinson: City Region and Regionalism (2nd edit.; London, 1960), p. 80. 27 The city-region concept is at the core of both the majority and dissenting proposals of the Maud

Commission that reported inJune, 1969. The commission quotes the definition submitted by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government: a city region "consists of a conurbation or one or more cities or big towns surrounded by a number of lesser towns and villages set in rural areas, the whole tied together by an intricate and closely meshed system of relationships and communications, and providing a wide range of employment and services" ("Local Government Reform: Short Version of the Report of the Royal Commission on Local Government in England" [London, 1969], p. 6). More would surely have approved of this statement and its influence on commission decisions.

23

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t Is)

MAPPING UTOPIA

THE URBAN GEOGRAPHY OF AMAUROTUM

It is in More's description of the capital, Amaurotum-the "Darkling City," or "City of the Clouds"-that we find the best material for mapping Utopian geography. The description begins by repeating that all the cities were alike in form, and Amaurotum had been chosen for detailed examina- tion because of its capital functions. The metropolis was set on the side of a low hill and was almost square, two miles in width and somewhat longer where it fronted the River Anyder (the "Waterless" River). This river rose from a small spring some eighty miles above the city,28 was joined by two

large tributaries so that it was half a mile wide on reaching the city, and continued some sixty miles beyond Amaurotum to the sea. The river was tidal to a point somewhat above the city. There is no mention of any struc- tures on the bank opposite the urban area, but an impressive bridge joined the two banks, "made not of piles or of timber, but of a stonewarke with

gorgious and substancial arches at that part of the citie that is farthest from the sea: to the intent that shippes maye passe along forbie all the side of the citie without let."29 A minor stream, a tributary of the Anyder, flowed out of the hill on which the city stood. "And because it riseth a litle without the citie, the Amaurotians have inclosed the head spring of it, with stronge fences and bulwarkes ... to the intente that their water should not be stopped nor turned away, or poysoned, if their enemies should chaunce to come upon them."30 Its channel had been regulated, and baked-clay culverts took fresh water to most parts of the city. This water supply was supplemented by the

storage of rainwater in cisterns. Amaurotum was girded, on the three sides not protected by the river, with a massive turreted wall, outside which was a

dry moat filled with underbrush and thorn hedges. This description of the

city I have mapped in Figure 3. The streets of all the cities were arranged to accommodate traffic con-

veniently and to act as a protection against the wind; they were uniformly twenty feet wide. More notes that the city plan was conceived by Utopus himself, and that records for a period of 1760 years describe how the structures within the plan gradually changed their design and materials; they were transformed from wood, plaster, and thatched huts to the three-storied brick, flint, and plaster row houses with glass windows that "existed" at the time of writing. In order that persons would not become attached to, or

28 Lumby, op. cit. [see footnote 3 above], p. 73, line 4, note "four and Twentie." 29 Ibid., lines 22-26. 30 Ibid., lines 26-30.

25

THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

overimprove, their homes, residences were reallocated every ten years. Each house had a front and a rear entrance, and with no concept of private proper- ty, citizens could come and go in any house as they pleased.

Each block of houses was similar to the next and enclosed a large garden (Fig. 4). In the gardens the Utopians grew vines, fruits, herbs, and flowers, and were much praised for their efforts. "Their studie and deligence herin commeth not onely of pleasure, but also of certen strife and contention that is between strete and strete, concerning the trimming, husbanding and fur- nisshing of their gardens: every man for his own parte."3I The traditional rivalries of the English gardeners had seemingly been transferred by More to the Utopian context.

This, then, is the main description of Amaurotum, though in later parts of the narrative various additional details come to light; for example, the presence of four market squares, the communal eating places, and some suggestions as to population size are included in the discussions of social life.

More seems to have been especially aware of urban problems. This is not really surprising, for he was an urban man. He had been born and raised in London, one of the greatest cities of Europe, and had served the city and its populace for many years. He was aware of the structural and social develop- ments that had taken place in the great cities of the Low Countries. He knew, too, of the power that cities had come to hold in contemporary Europe and of the classes that had arisen from the expansion of urban society. With this wide experience we might expect the models for his geographical description of Amaurotum to be many. Ames32 has suggested that Ghent provided the basis for the description, and Mumford33 makes some interesting comparisons with perhaps the greatest of fifteenth-century European cities, Venice.

But a study of the description of Amaurotum makes it fairly evident that London was the principal guide. In the marginal glosses Erasmus notes of the River Anydrus and Amaurotum: "The verie like in England in the river of Thamys" and "herein also doeth London agre with Amaurote."34 And agree it does. The medieval city of London and its surrounding settlements were set on a series of hills, or terraces, rising gently above the Thames. The Thames itself is derived from a spring, though its source is more than 150 miles above London. Its tidal regime, similar to that noted by More for the Anydrus, had been described by Polydore Virgil in his "English History."

3I Ibid., p. 75, lines 4-8. 32 Ames, op. cit. [see footnote 6 above], p. 98. 33 Lewis Mumford: The City in History (New York, 1961), pp. 321-335. 34 Lumby, op. cit. [see footnote 3 above], p. 73.

26

MAPPING UTOPIA

London Bridge, certainly an impressive structure in More's time, was located above the main dock area so that river traffic was not interrupted. The analogy for the small river flowing from the hill through the city to the main

FIG. 4-"To every dwelling house a garden platte adjoyn- ing." This plan of one (and every) city block in Amaurotum is based on More's description.

river could be the Fleet, which was in evidence until the nineteenth century but has since been driven underground, or it could have been the Walbrook, which formerly bisected the City of London.

The essential city form of More's day was probably little different from the Roman city described by Coppock: The Roman city of Londinium was located on two low hills (now Ludgate Hill and Corn- hill) carved out of the Taplow terrace north of the Thames. This site, where the alluvium narrows considerably to make for easier access from the south, was probably the then tidal limit and the lowest possible bridging point; it was also the only point for some distance up- and downstream at which the higher ground north of the Thames reaches the river. The site had several other advantages. It was fairly easily defensible, for it was surrounded by

27

THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

lower ground-the estuary of the Fleet to the west, the Shoreditch to the east and the tributaries of the Walbrook, which bisected the city, to the north. The river was navigable for large ships and the mouths of the tributary streams provided minor harbours. The wall which enclosed the Roman city followed the limits of the higher ground. .. "35

In two important details More's Amaurotum did not entirely agree with the form of medieval London. Although the plan of Roman London had been

regular and well conceived, the piecemeal additions of several hundred years had destroyed this functional pattern and replaced it with a maze of ill-served

streets, which have left remnants of their ragged paths in the modern city. Nor were the houses of late medieval London the neatly faced structures of More's Utopia. There were gardens and expansive estates in close proximity to the city, but the central area was rather the "Darkling City" that the translation of "Amaurotum" suggests.

Some of the features that More added to the basic plan provided by con-

temporary London were to be found in other cities of his day. In the Low Countries there were urban centers in which more attention had been paid to

design, and in southern Europe Venice, Vigevano, Siena, and other cities had

squares akin to the sectional market places of More's city. Nevertheless, the

European environment in which More lived contained few urban areas that we would recognize as having been "designed." As Gutkind notes, "the Middle Ages possessed a sense of space but not yet an idea of space. This means that spatial relations existed; but they were simply there, not deliber-

ately created. They existed by the sheer juxtaposition of houses and their connection with the streets or squares. It was a pure topographical dis- tribution. . 36

As a voice of the Renaissance, More created in space not only a city, but a whole state. Indeed, he created space for living and went farther than that to advocate the social structure that was to occupy such space. To ensure that Utopians appreciated their natural surroundings, the urban populace

35J. T. Coppock: A General View of London and Its Environs, in Greater London (edited by J. T. Coppock and Hugh C. Prince; London, 1964), pp. 19-41; reference on p. 26.

36 Erwin A. Gutkind: Urban Development in Central Europe (New York and London, 1964), p. 176. Giedion sees the greatest step in Renaissance design as occurring between 1420 and 1430 with the "idea" of space noted by Gutkind appearing in Masaccio's "Fresco of the Trinity" in Florence. But the transfer of the barrel-vault perspective painted by Masaccio to a structure did not occur until the com-

pletion of Leon Battista Alberti's Church of Sant' Andrea in Mantua in 1514, the year "Utopia" was

begun (Sigfried Giedion: Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition [Sth edit.; Cam-

bridge, Mass., 1967], p. 32). In the first decades of the sixteenth century the main Italian interest con- tinued to be on the star-shaped city first discussed by Filarete in his "Trattato d'archittura," written between 1451 and 1464. In the 1490's both Francesco di Giorgio and Leonardo da Vinci produced designs for polygonal "ideal-cities" crossed by a major river and planned on a grid pattern (Giedion, op. cit., p. 52).

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MAPPING UTOPIA

were to be provided with enforced rural retreats: as Mumford remarks, "More makes sure of his garden city by educating garden-citizens."37 What More appeared to suggest was the retention of the better values of medieval and earlier societies in a physical structure of the future. The intimate social associations resulting from crowded living conditions were to be retained; his new urban blocks were, in modem planning terminology, "high density." The city size was of the future; for the Utopian cities had more than a hun- dred thousand persons living within their walls. In More's day this was much more a figure of the future than of the past or present. True, some major European cities such as Venice, Florence, and Milan were well above the hundred thousand mark by the sixteenth century, but these were exceptions and in each case population pressure had to some degree distorted the urban fabric.

The simple checkerboard design was employed to accommodate the

proposed population in comfort. The form that More advocated was not common at the time he wrote, but it had classical antecedents and was to be

accepted as a basis for organized urban structure in the baroque designs that were to appear on the European landscape. Greek aims in urban design were to give inhabitants of the city security and happiness. Security came from the walls and from the political structure they contained; happiness from the subtle blending of rural and urban elements in a pleasant design. Such de-

signed environments were seldom found in the early sixteenth century, and it was More's major purpose to suggest their revival. In Utopia, as in the cities of Greece, the home seemed almost incidental to the pleasures of com- munal activity in horticulture, eating, or debate.38 The Hellenistic cities, like Amaurotum, had a regular street pattern, but Utopian cities were better structured than Greek cities and appear rather to resemble examples of Roman urban planning. Twenty feet was the average width of Roman city streets, which, again like Amaurotum, were bordered by fairly high-density housing blocks that surrounded large courtyards used for recreation. As in Amaurotum, the rectangular block pattern was the most evident feature of the Roman urban plan. In the Roman city this pattern was broken only by the insertion of major public buildings, again a feature of the Utopian city.

More's planning suggestions heralded-though they were certainly not responsible for-a new period of urban design. But it would be incorrect to

37 Mumford, The City in History [see footnote 33 above], p. 325. 38 For a sound account of the functional aspects of the Greek city see A. E. J. Morris: Greek City

States, Official Architecture and Planning, Vol. 30, 1967, pp. 837-844.

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THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

assume that the planning ideals of the classical periods had been entirely lost, however few the examples of planned urban developments in More's day. The formally planned French bastides and their English counterparts, together with the urban tools of German colonization east of the Elbe, serve to remind us of the existence of a form of medieval planning. When defense needs dictated the remodeling of an urban area, the medieval engineer was also equal to the task. In urban design, the Renaissance was a prelude to the activities of the baroque period of the seventeenth century. More gave his readers some idea of the form of the cities of the future.

Although elements of Utopian city form do appear in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European landscapes, the rural-urban society that More advocated has never been achieved. In the four hundred and fifty years since he wrote, some of his ideas have been used. Few Utopian groups have been large enough to build a village, let alone a city, but a twentieth-

century exception illustrates the fact that More's ideas, even if they are never

put into practice, are not yet dead. In 1898 Ebenezer Howard produced his book, "Tomorrow: A Peaceful Plan to Real Reform,"39 in which he ad- vocated the building of a garden city with a population of some 32,000

persons who would have the advantages of both rural and urban life. With the architects Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, he put this idea into

practice in 1903 at Letchworth Garden City,40 which has provided the basis for the ambitious programs of new-town construction in England and else- where.

Urban forms have changed to accommodate the automobile and the

factory, and the life of "security and happiness" advocated by Aristotle and illustrated by More is perhaps a little closer to being achieved in the new towns and garden cities of today. But the regular internal divisions, together with many other aspects of "Utopia," still seem to be far from reality.

39 This work was revised and reissued as "Garden Cities of Tomorrow" (1902). The latest edition, with valuable introductions by Lewis Mumford and F. J. Osborn, was published in London in 1965. The

leap from More to Howard omits other major Utopian proposals, many of which may be worthy of

geographical examination. For a fairly complete list see Mumford, The Story of Utopias [see footnote 7

above]. 40 Letchworth Garden City is in Hertfordshire, England.

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