Jean-Louis VIOLEAU, Sociologist, professor at the ENSA Paris Malaquais, director of the research unit ACS-UMR AUSser MCC/CNRS 3329
Well adapted, calm and compliant, in short conformist: being fully of one’s time prevents one from observing it up close in order to better understand it. The present has become so overwhelming and the times so precarious. Rather than interpret and transform the world, is what remains for us today only to preserve it? Yet, the utopia resists, otherwise what and why would we criticise? Tomorrow is never definitively written in stone, and the utopian drive is also a meditation on radical otherness. Temporal alterity is a form of distance that can help us locate ourselves and regain our ability to think and act. To quote Miguel Abensour: “the eternal denunciation of utopia, repeated by today’s prosecutors, will not prevent men from being a utopian animal”. Utopia today would draw a critical horizon rather than “bright tomorrows”: the latter have too often been only a weapon of patience justifying immediate sacrifices in the name of a nebulous future. Thus, the decision that Ecuador will have taken in 2010 was utopian: in exchange for financial compensation, Quito refused to exploit a promising deposit located in the heart of the Amazon rainforest in the Yasuni National Park. To “Yasunise” is utopian because this act also breaks off with a whole section of the history of Utopia that is filled with the spirit of conquest, of nature in the first place. How then to Yasunise our “ecometropolises”? Has a part of the history of architecture – and the urban theories on which it has relied – not already found itself crossed by this injunction? What if the sustainable city was just an attempt to “moralise” the city of the twentieth century? Just as the critical gaze focused on the city of the previous century had basically only sought to moralise it (Bernardo Secchi, 2005)…