(Not) by design: Utopian moments in the creation of Canberra.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Rigby, Kate
• Date: 22 September 2005

In an article from 2001 entitled 'Ecopolitics by Design', David Wright draws attention to the 'unique integration of political idealism and ecological thinking' that characterizes the work of Walter Burley Griffin as the principal architect of Australia's federal capital. In Wright's assessment, Griffin's legacy has been unjustly overlooked by those attempting 'to map ecopolitical thinking in Australia', as a consequence, he suspects, 'both of the character and scale of the canvas he worked'. (1) In the meantime, Canberra's present-day city planners have embarked upon their own practical revaluation of the 'Griffin Legacy'. This they see not so much as a 'blue-print that fixes the future planning of Canberra in rigid detail', as setting 'the big picture, identifying those things of value which should endure while allowing flexibility to respond to emerging needs and opportunities'. (2) Within the National Capital Authority's (NCA) vision of 'the big picture', the radical democratic and ecospiritual elements of Griffin's Canberra plan, variously illuminated in the research cited by Wright, inevitably get flattened into the familiar mantra of the triple bottom line. The endeavour to integrate economic, social and environmental considerations in the further development of Canberra doubtless manifests a certain utopian impulse of its own, while nonetheless falling short of the recognition that their genuine reconciliation would necessitate a far more profound transformation of the prevailing ecosocial order than is currently intended by the NCA. I will return to a consideration of this and other utopian stirrings in contemporary Canberra at the end of this article. What principally concerns me here, however, is the programmatic utopianism that is discernable in Griffin's--or rather (for it was evidently a collaborative effort) the Griffins'--vision for the federal capital. In particular, I will follow Wright in taking a closer look at the ecopolitical dimension of this utopian design project. In so doing, I will illuminate a certain tension, perhaps even a contradiction, with which all systemic eco-utopias are bound to wrestle: that is, between the Promethean ambition to remake the world and the ecocentric ethos of attunement to the given. (3) From the ecopolitical perspective that frames this study, the utopian ambition to create a better future by design appears at once absolutely necessary and necessarily problematic.

According to Ernst Bloch, who famously first diagnosed such a thing as a 'utopian impulse' and proceeded to trace its many and varied manifestations throughout history and across cultures, the artful shaping of space in the design of buildings and towns is inherently utopian in the general sense that architecture 'as a whole is and remains an attempt to produce a human homeland'. Moreover, 'all great buildings', in his analysis, 'were sui generis built into the utopia, the anticipation of a space adequate to man'. (4) Unlike some of the other major German philosophical works of the mid-20th century, notably Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), written in exile by Bloch's friends Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, or Martin Heidegger's essays on technology, poetry and dwelling of the 1940s and 1950s, from which Ernst Bloch is at pains to distance himself, the marxist philosopher's monumental Principle of Hope (1959) still awaits discovery as a precursor of contemporary ecological thought. Admittedly, his comments on architecture are not encouraging in this regard, implying as they do that the earth requires a makeover before it can become a place where humans truly belong. 'Nature' nonetheless plays a pivotal role in Bloch's resolutely this-worldly understanding of the not-yet place towards which the utopian impulse ultimately tends: the earthly homeland that could properly be brought into being, he insisted (albeit with dwindling faith in Soviet-style 'real existing socialism'), only through marxism. This becomes especially apparent in his discussion of 'technological utopias'. Recalling Marx's observation in The Holy Family that the private property relation 'alienates not only the individuality of human beings but also that of things', (5) Bloch argues that under capitalism, nature appears exclusively in the mode of natura dominata, being valued solely in instrumental terms as a means to an end, subject to human control and exploitation. Reviving the concept of nature as productive process rather than static mechanism, as posited in the Naturphilosophie of Hegel and above all Schelling, (6) Bloch holds to the hope that the emancipatory transformation of human relations would also restore nature to the status of natura naturans, a subject in its own right. Thus recognizing the independent agency and co-productivity of nature, he suggests, necessitates the development of new forms of technology, based on the principle of 'alliance' rather than domination. For, writes Bloch, 'it is certain that the human house not only stands in history and on the foundation of human activity, it also stands above all on the foundation of a mediated natural subject and on the building site of nature' (original italics). (7)

If we follow Bloch, then, it would appear that the term 'ecoutopianism' is in a sense tautological. For the future that is anticipated within his analysis of the utopian impulse is none other than the place of a fully emancipated oikos. 'Nature', Bloch writes towards the end of this truly extraordinary work, far from being consigned to the 'past' (as some modernists and, latterly, many so-called postmodernists would have it) belongs crucially to the 'future', if indeed humanity is to have one at all: 'It is not only the soil of man but also his lasting surroundings; it is certainly not a burnt-out ruin but rather the architecture for a drama that has not yet been performed'. Writing in the wake of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in the midst of the Cold War, Bloch follows this affirmation with an acknowledgement that the persistence of nature, in the sense of those life-processes that enable human existence and thus afford humanity the very possibility of a future on earth, was by no means assured: 'In all human history so far the drama that could transform nature into a bygone has at least not yet been played to its end; if human history has not yet dawned into brightness, then certainly nature has not yet done so through human history'. (8) Today, however, it seems that the tables have turned, in that it is now conceivable that 'nature' might well consign 'history' to the past, rather than vice versa--the history, at any rate, of modern technological progress, which inadvertently has so altered the earth's ecosystems that they look increasingly uncongenial to human, as well as much other-than-human, life. Within this unprecedented horizon of global ecosocial imperilment, in which hope is especially hard to come by, a new kind of utopian impulse is emerging: one that no longer looks to nature, as Bloch still does, as a stage-setting or building site for the emancipatory projects of humanity, but rather recognizes our multifarious 'earth others' as worthy of emancipation in their own right.

A possible point of departure for this alternative eco-utopianism might be found in Heidegger's concept of 'dwelling poetically'. (9) As I understand it, this entails a praxis of place-making that allows the other-than-human dimensions of earth, sky and divinity to persist in their own being (and hence becoming) even while aspects thereof are drawn into relationship with us 'mortals' in those things of our creation that supply the world in which we make our home. For Heidegger, it is not only the atom bomb but also the atomic power station that endangers the earth, to the extent that it instantiates that modern practice of technological 'enframing' that, he fears, threatens to turn all things, humans included, into 'standing reserve'. Against this, Heidegger calls for the recovery of the poietic potential of techne, namely as a mode of making that reveals, rather than enframes, the materials being worked, in the context of a renewed practice of dwelling, which, as he puts it, 'saves the earth', precisely by respecting its opacity, alterity and potentially resistant agency. To dwell, insofar as we save the earth, is then to create and maintain a place of habitation suitable for human life that summons earth, sky, divinity and mortals into a nexus of interrelationship, yet in such a way as to disclose how the other-than-human perpetually escapes our grasp, potentially eluding whatever designs we might have on it. Recalling Bloch's theatrical metaphor, one might say that dwelling poetically resists the reduction of our earth-others to the status of props or backdrops for an exclusively human show, respecting that they have their own dramas to enact, in which we may or may not be invited to play a role.

To summarize this philosophical preamble, then, the horizon of hope within which I am viewing the case of the Griffins' Canberra is one that envisages a space where the socially emancipatory utopianism of Bloch might be wedded to an ecosophical ethos of dwelling derived from Heidegger. It is in the anticipation of this imagined locus of ecosocialist homecoming, which comes to us, as Fredric Jameson says of all utopian projections, as a 'barely audible message ... from a future that may never come into being', (10) that I will endeavour to discern both the promise and the problems that are manifest in the envisioning of Australia's federal capital. What I should also stress at the outset is that I approach this question without any particular expertise in architectural history or urban planning, but as a cultural historian and critical theorist with a particular interest in literature. Let me then make my way towards the creation of Canberra with the assistance of a poem (recalling that for...