Designing Utopia: John Ruskin's Urban Vision for Britain and America

Michael H. Lang

Designing Utopia reintroduces John Ruskin not just as an art critic, but as a visionary whose ideas on beauty, justice, and community imagined reshaping the built world. From his fierce critiques of industrial capitalism to his bold attempts to forge a guild-based society, Ruskin’s work sparked a lineage of designers and thinkers, including Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard, Lewis Mumford, who sought to humanize the city. This book traces that legacy from the cobblestone streets of Victorian England to today’s New Urbanists like Duany and Plater-Zyberk, revealing how Ruskin’s dream of a just, livable city still animates the architecture of hope.

Praise for Designing Utopia

"Michael Land has shown, for the first time, the remarkable influence of John Ruskin on the origins of the nineteenth-century city planning movement. This book deserves to be widely read by planning historians and all those concerned with the main currents of Victorian thought." – Sir Peter Hall, FBA, MAE, PhD, HonMRTPI, Professor of Planning, Bartlett School of Architecture, Enivornmental Design and Planning, University College, London

"Most valuable ... reminds us of the continuing debt owed by Anglo-American urban planning to the physical and social ideal of community ... as contrasted with a present reality of planning that is too often merely a means of protecting already powerful interests." – Professor Stephen V. Ward, School of Planning, Oxford Brookes University

Michael H. Lang is Associate Professor and Chair at the Department of Urban Studies and Community Planning, Rutgers University, in Camden, New Jersey. He is the author of Homelessness Amid Affluence and Gentrification Amid Urban Decline.