Book: ‘Utopie: Texts and Projects, 1967-1978’

In Paris, at the end of the 1960s, a cohort of architects, landscape architects, theorists, and sociologists created a magazine, Utopie: Sociologie de l’urbain. Galvanized by the Paris student protests of the decade, and reacting against the technocratic public-housing projects of Charles de Gaulle’s government, the avant-garde publication examined everything from Marxism to race to public spaces, yet always with the same visionary question in mind: How will cities look and function in the distant future? Now, 34 years after the magazine stopped its presses, a new anthology brings many of its seminal essays into English for the first time. Utopie: Texts and Projects, 1967-1978, edited by Craig Buckley and Jean-Louis Violeau, presents 29 texts, each arranged in a facsimile of the publication’s original, innovative layouts. • $24.95; Semiotext(e), April 2011.