speculative fiction of the Common Border considers an expanded notion of common land, envisioning space that is private but shared as well as independent but integrated. The fiction also foregrounds two premises that utopian visions have typically accepted without question or critique: both Downing and Wright premised their utopias on a normative patriarchal family and the necessity of land ownership. Downing and Wright determined the family to be the nucleus of a new society and economy. Downing’s vision positioned a pioneering man protecting his family against a wild environment, while Wright, in contrast, pitted the family, led by a “manly man,” against the corruptive forces of the city, or symbolically, the failures of other men. Their utopias are antagonistic at their core, setting man against nature and other men and expressing skepticism of social structures outside the family, explicitly rejecting spaces of communal living. However, neither their definition of family nor their support for individualism are useful today, as past definitions of what constitutes a family no longer reflect the social organisation of our society and global challenges, such as pandemics, climate change, and economic inequality, require collective action. A contemporary utopian vision, therefore, would prioritise mutualism over competition. This, furthermore, suggests that our modification of Downing’s cottage is a failure, as the architecture remains a physical manifestation of the self-sufficient normative family. The design of the cottage demands greater investment in finding new spatial modes of co-habitation and resource exchange that will facilitate “… breaking up the false alternative between family conservation and market conformity.” The new configurations must not work to preserve the traditional family but to imagine architectures that will allow “Men and women themselves… to invent and test out new forms of living together beyond feudally ascribed roles.” If we are being optimistic, we can hope that the erosion of privacy in the bedroom, as a consequence of our technology use, will correspond to an extension of obligations to a social group beyond the family and the corresponding confines of the house. However, this is also an architectural problem. How do we extend the responsibility and privacy historically afforded to the family beyond the boundaries of the home and into a landscape of mutual care? It is worth remembering that the commons of the eighteenth century was neither private nor public space, despite expressing characteristics of both. Resources of the commons were shared between families, as in the public sphere, however, the space was also beyond the control of the nascent capitalist economy, as in the private sphere.
Finally, returning to where we started, we might wonder what would happen if we had land that was neither claimed by the public nor by private entities. Downing and Wright believed that each citizen should own land. However, imagining the existence of an alternative commons that avoided land parcellation leads us to ponder the outcome if Downing or Wright had taken a theoretical step further and rejected land ownership outright and instead envisioned a model of free access and fair use. If we are to address global challenges that are products of our social and economic structures, such as climate change, then our present utopias will have to move past Downing and Wright. Beyond a commitment to individual land ownership exists design speculations that envision ways of living on unowned and un-zoned land with indeterminate usage. These speculations would lead us to ponder the land on which we tread when we step off the sidewalk today. Would this land serve a function? What new relationships would we have with this unclaimed land? Our imaginary mid-eighteenth-century proposal is a model of land organisation that projects a shared private space on a newly emerging capitalist economy. Private here does not mean individualised but instead indicates a space that remains independent from the outside economy, and land in this context is not zoned to extract use value but is shared and mutually improved. Set in the past, this design speculation renders an instance of ‘what if?’ Pondering the answer leads to the follow-up, ‘so, what now?’ O
to which every home should have access was at the core of a later American utopian vision. Almost one hundred years after Downing, Frank Lloyd Wright described the ‘Broadacre City’ in his 1932 book The Disappearing City : ‘On the basis of an acre to the family, architecture would come again into the service, not of the landlord, but of the man himself as an organic feature of his own ground. Architecture would no longer be merely adapted, commercialized space to be sold and resold… Ground space is the essential basis of the new city of a new life.’ Wright assessed one acre as the minimum amount of land to sustain a family. He envisioned landholders occupied in intensive farming, living off of what they produced and sharing any excess at market. In this society, Wright characterised families as independent but integrated. Wright imagines a new agrarian economy and, as if trying to recreate the lost commons of England, he says of the farmer, “He does not need many fences except those that are a part of his buildings.” If one acre of land sufficed for Wright, we will not ask for more in the Common Border. Just as we stretched Downing’s utopian cottage, so too can we scale Wright’s ideal parcel of land. At eighteen feet across, one parcel in the Common Border would extend close to 2,500 feet in length, which is less than twice around a running track. With commoners circulating between the crops, each home would work enough land to produce the necessities and achieve the independence that Wright sought. At the same time, each home would be a comfortable eight-minute walk apart from one another through the border’s path, which facilitates local exchange of necessities and regional specialties without relying on a separate infrastructure of commerce that results in the accumulation of wealth central to Downing and Wright’s critiques. This speculative fiction thus preempts the utopian schemes subsequent to the eighteenth century that responded to the radical reorganisation of land prompted by the enclosure of the commons in England. The Common Border pushes the essence of Downing and Wright’s critiques back in time and spatialises an alternative past. new forms of living and new relations to land Today, a century after Wright’s Broadacre City, our critique of land organisation advances. As Downing and Wright made clear, the organisation of land is foundational to our society and economy. Understanding and addressing longstanding structural inequalities, thus, requires experimenting in alternative modes of organising land. The
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 19
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