Using Visualisation to Test Historical Utopian Cities on a Modern Audience

At last year’s EVA conference, a paper was presented entitled ‘Utopian Cities from 15 th to 19 th Century Literature: A Philosophical Investigation through 3-D Visualisation’. This paper outlined a project that examines ten utopian cities from social reform literature. Each one of these works proposed a utopian community which was to be governed according to a particular political philosophy and outlined an architectural plan for the cities. These philosophies are considered to be important political philosophies of their respective eras and have subsequently made their mark in the history of ideas and politics. The central research question of this project is: does the architectural plan of the utopian cities with their the housing, communication systems, communal spaces, reflect the political philosophy of that city? To test this question four of the cities, two from the seventeenth century and two from the nineteenth century, were reconstructed using 3-D modelling program ArchiCAD and a survey was conducted on a modern audience. The survey used a series of images from the visually constructed cities. This paper considers the use of visualisation to test history and philosophy on a modern audience and whether such an approach can be considered successful.