The city as headquarters of dystopic imagination: literature, space and control

Abstract

The present study outlines the relationship between controlled societies described in two distopian novels, Brave New World - by Aldous Huxley- and 1984 -by George Orwell-, the landscape they were placed in -concerning a city morfology, housing and spatial distribution- and the dominant social theories in the late industrial stage. Moreover, the study shows that the "machine methafor" applied to disciplinary societes turns out an explanation of the link between the Tratadists's control of details, the fabian sociology and the parsonian's functionalism; the analysis shows that the straight connection between past designings, imaginations of the future and a building of the present, is not just an hypotesis.