America and the three urban utopias_abstract

America and the three urban utopias Gonçalo Furtado, PhD America has always been seen as an Eldorado, a virgin landscape where the most utopian dreams could be realized. Today, North America is a "universal machine" that continues to normalize the world's imagination, so to address it is to reflect on the cultural model that we are absorbing on the Old Continent. America was initially based on the myth of freedom, then on that of progress and today on that of globalization. But the idea of freedom has often translated into a uniformity that excludes what is different. The idea of progress, which was only slightly shaken during the Great Wars, was reflected in the acceleration of fashion and consumerism as phenomena necessary for the survival of production itself. The idea of globalization is currently sliding towards Americanization, since it is from this geography that the focus of power in this process emanates. We are dealing with a progressive ideological colonization that, in the case of Europe, dates back to the post-war period, when, through the Marshall Plan, a moral happiness for citizens was constructed based on middle-class consumption. In this paper we analyse three urban utopian models: the horizontality of the suburb, the verticality of the suburb, and the digital city