Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning and The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America Available to Purchase

Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago’s Against the Commons and Irene Cheng’s The Shape of Utopia share the intention to reveal interconnections between social transformation and space. The former uses case studies to examine “the mechanics of spatial dispossession” (2), while the latter analyzes the relationship between the aspiration of social reforms and the symbolic aspect of space in several geometric utopias in nineteenth-century America.

In Against the Commons, Sevilla-Buitrago argues that “urban planning and capitalist urbanization have actually been key agents in the decollectivization of society and the destruction of communal space” (2). He investigates the role of space in decommonizing society, focusing on specific cases in British, American, German, and Italian contexts to show how “the project of planning [is] . . . a constituent part of a larger systematic imperative” (3). The “commons” serves as a heuristic category through which to explore how spatial planning influences capitalism’s rise, growth, and...