Post-Political Attitudes on Immigration, Utopias and the Space Between Us

Geopolitical space has always been a conflicted and fragile topic. Borders and frontiers are changing so fast that sometimes one’s sociopolitical status can change from “citizen” to “immigrant” or re-main “immigrant” much of your life. We are getting used to words like refugee, enclave, war, borders, limits. This critical condition is not a minor problem. The International Migration Report 2006 states that in 2005, there were nearly 191 million international migrants world-wide, about three percent of the world population, a rise of 26 million since 1990. This is one of the biggest political problems we face. In this context, we can see how the political implications of some architects had led them to design what we may call “critical utopias.” The concept of dystopia is a critic and utopia is an evocation of a new world to come. This duality was the basis of some radical proj-ects of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Superstudio’s Twelve Ideal Cities, their satirical vision of humanity’s search for an ideal world, or Archizoom’s No-Stop City.