Response to David Harvey's A View from Federal Hill and Spaces of Utopia

What I have gathered from both of these articles, especially from “Spaces of Utopia” is that both authors are stuck trying to utilize fifteenth century ideals and conceptions of the city to deal with twenty-first century problems. The idea of utopia is nearly a forgotten dream, it is not what drives the work and desires of individuals. No one dreams of a country of like-minded individuals with perfect similarity and an inherent lack of problems. I am not saying that people want the kind of social and economic problems that Baltimore currently suffers from, but they want the enrichment of societal styles and lifestyle possibilities that come from the collaboration and unification of many people. If this wasn’t the dream of the modern world, why are hundreds of people a day moving to the United States, to live and experience this, whatever this is, regardless of their potential plight. Maybe that is the issue, we desire a semblance of unity rather than a utopia, a unity based on differences working together with each of their individual styles. In general I feel that as an entire community we are not using modern innovation to approach this as a problem, a problem belonging to everyone involved. It is not just a “social issue” caused by the wealthy in discrimination against the poor. These were issues fifty years ago in the 1960s – its 2011, the people who started these issues are gone, we have to deal with them as problems and approach them the same way our society would to any other conventional technological issue in order to advance. As society and technology move closer and closer together, our analysis methodologies, synthesis reconstructions, and ultimately solutions must merge into a unified approach as we develop a new construction of the future. So, simply to answer the question, Baltimore is not a utopia, of any sort.