UTOPY AND PROJECT IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Abstract

While the notion of utopia appears in Europe with Thomas More in the early sixteenth century, it quickly articulates with America whose operations of conquest and colonization has much to do. Not only More used on the cover of the original edition a schematic map of Tenochtitlan but Europe gives to recent colonies an enabling space to realize their utopian ideas from a systemic notion of the city to different versions of settlements and utopian societies by actions of the religious orders. Since then not only this first globalization is articulated around this Renaissance concept forged in Europe but then spreads to other manifestations of utopian practices from the largely frustrated socialist experiences to anarchists or figures productive paternalism to lead to certain expressions of modernity from the happy versions of collective housing to technological, typological and urban experimentalism of great utopians as Sergio Bernardes or Amancio Williams.