Concrete Utopia

So I met with four fantastic Architecture students this week and tried to explain to the them what I meant by Concrete Utopia in the sense of Ernst Blochs thinking I should probably get Johan Siebers to help on this but put very simply I think it means this.

Bloch suggests that everything is in a state of the 'not yet' - I sometimes say 'becoming' but really we should stick to the 'not yet.' So in platonic thinking everything - well usually a hammer or a tree is aspiring to a complete representation of itself. Block suggests that this complete point of the fully realised treeness of a tree is always in a state of - and I will use hyphens -Moving-towards. I did read something somewhere that Johan wrote about the end of everything been the only realisable singularity but I'm not sure that fits with my search for redemption through building play equipment.

If we take the idea of the not-yet and utopia as something we are moving towards then as Peter Thompson, another well known Bloch enthusiast or Bloch head as I will now call them, told me concrete Utopia is something that we enact through the very real process of building it.

Many more traditional framings of utopia and it's current overuse as we reach 500 years since the publication of Thomas Moores book present us with the notion of Abstract Utopia. A place that theoretically exist - from the root of the word nowhere and somewhere but something that although abstract is to an extent complete. Abstract Utopian thinking gets lots of bad press from pragmatic people who say it's pie in the sky wishing for things to get better without actually doing anything, hope, also gets tarred with the same brush. There is no balance in this argument, Concrete utopia is in opposition to abstract utopia they do not walk hand in hand. Concrete utopia requires responsibility and focused collective action and a realisation that utopia is both a temporal and spacial destination that will never be reached.

That is as close as I can come to making sense in a blog post about the different between concrete and abstract Utopian thinking but over the last three years I have found it useful. It helps me in been able to get on and do things, to in whatever way we can try to make things better. It makes me think of small change and small actions, the cracks in the fabric of the things that people insist cannot change. The connectedness of people who decide to take action however disparate and disconnected those actions are. So we build and we make because building and making is concrete and through building and making we can on good days build and remake ourselves and essentially move towards a destination which is not quite yet. Perhaps that is why we ask our parents if we are 'nearly there yet' at the start of every journey.