Peter Marcuse in Eurozine:
Re-imagining the city can be a provocation to reconsider and expand the range of possibilities for a city in the future. It can simply be an opportunity for an unfettered imagination physically to design something completely new and different, not tethered to the existing city. Or it can open the door to a fundamentally critical view of the existing city, questioning the social and economic and organizational principles that underlie its present constitution and are normally taken for granted. The best of classic utopias do both. What follows focuses only on the latter, on the imagining not of the physical but of the human principles and practices on which an imagined city could be based. It raises some critical questions about some of the principles and practices as they implicitly exist today and imagines some alternatives.
If we were not concerned with the existing built environment of cities, but could mold a city from scratch, after our heart's desire, Robert Park's formulation that David Harvey is fond of quoting, how would such a city look? Or rather: according to what principles would it be organized? For its detailed look, its physical design, should only evolve after the principles it is to serve have been agreed upon. So what, in our heart of hearts, should determine what a city is and does?
Why not start, first, by taking the question literally. Suppose we had neither physical nor economic constraints, what would we want, in our hearts? Never mind that the supposition posits a utopia; it is a thought experiment that may awaken some questions whose answers might in fact influence what we do today, in the real world, on the way to an imagined other world that we might want to strive to make possible.
More here.