The ideal city does not exist

Vincent Callebaut on nature, architecture, and why the concept of the ideal city was a modernist fantasy.

French original published in December 2020 on the Fondation Bouygues Immobilier blog Demain la Ville. Translation mine.

In the 13th arrondissement of Paris, a bamboo exoskeleton helps the building support the load of green balconies. (Image: Vincent Callebaut Architectures)

What exactly is the “ideal city”?

The scheme of the ideal city is somewhat of a twentieth century idea. Our parents’ and grandparents’ generations dreamed of having a detached family house with a private garden outside the city — a city that had itself been imagined by modernists, notably Le Corbusier, as a living organism where each district represented an organ. This vision leads to the hyper-energy-intensive cities we knew at the end of the twentieth century. That is, cities designed in a mono-functional way: a business district in La Défense, a museumified city centre, bourgeois neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods for immigrants, residential housing in the suburbs…

This pattern made possible the explosion of automobile dependence and urban sprawl. A city that expends huge amounts of energy on heating, lighting and moving its citizens.

Where are we today? The pandemic and the environmental crisis have revived many debates on urban…