Ütopya Düşüncesinin Şehir Planlama ve Tasarım Eğitiminde Kullanımı: İradesiz Ütopyacılık

Abstract

The use of utopia as a valuable method in architecture and urban design education helps to think beyond the given borders. However, the regulation of the education system, based on rational, analytical or scientific paradigms, has led to the removal of utopia from modern architecture and urbanism, because of being an archaic and outdated idea. The aim of this study is to reconsider the relationship between utopia and design education and to examine the contribution of weak utopianism as an approach to planning education over an unbuilt environment. Methodologically, by using time-space dimensions of Agamben’s Messianic utopianism and Lewis’s “weak utopian thinking”, the empirical results of the application in planning education were given. Within the fiction of messianic time and space, an archaeological site, Kültepe/ Kayseri, is chosen as a design project area for planning education and a quantitative survey was conducted subsequently. The results indicate that the use of weak utopianism in planning education contributed to students’ creative thinking. It is emphasized that the utopian thinking as a method in planning education must be revived. This study has found that the paradigm which must be pursued in the utopian urbanism should be developed in the actual cartography in order to produce the imperfect ideal.