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In America during the nineteenth century those who believed that the nation no longer upheld their religious and social values, and that American society had strayed from the path of righteousness, began to form their own religious communities. These communal organisations saw themselves as agents for their own creation of utopia in America and often totally withdrew from normal life, setting up their own villages and communes based on their unique belief systems.

Protestant communities in New York and New England, such as Rochester and Oneida, quickly sprung up and became characteristic of the nation’s drive for religious and cultural reform: ‘Utopia would be realized on earth, and it would be made by God with the active and united collaboration of His people’ (Johnson 1978: 110). Utopia could be achieved through balancing the needs of the individual and the community.

During this period of religious revival there were hundreds of utopias within America and each one was envisioned by a community dedicated to preserving and prolonging their own version of religious utopia in fulfi lment of their divine mission. However, what these communities shared was ‘a faith in the perfectibility of mankind and a belief that the millennium was at hand’. Whether these communities disavowed drinking or promoted free love, they all desired ‘to bring heaven on earth’ (Walters 1978: 39)—that heaven would be founded in America. Consequently, the utopian drive in American culture reached its peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, resulting in the most famous example of American utopian literature, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.

Bellamy’s famous utopian novel celebrates the march toward America’s future. Written at a time when the Progressive Movement and religious groups aimed to reform urban American society by returning to community values of the small town, ‘Looking Backward anticipated the movement for reform not through the rousing rhetoric of revolution but by espousing rationalist principles and proposing a national bureaucracy and a disciplined industrial army as answers to “the labor problem” ’ (Tallack 1991: 12).

The Progressive Era in American history can be defi ned as a largely city-based movement, focused on the reform of the social inequities of the nineteenth century looking forward to a new liberalism concerned for the working classes, wider social responsibility and the modernisation of the economy and industry. Much like the Puritan concern with the past and how it should infl uence the present, Bellamy (1888: 2) stressed in his preface that the American utopia was achievable through faith and hard work: ‘Nowhere can we fi nd more solid ground for daring anticipation of human development during the next one thousand years, than by “Looking Backward” upon the progress of the last one hundred.’

The book provided social thinkers and architects with a stimulus for their redesigning of the nation’s cities and social structures. Bellamy’s main protagonist is Julian West, a time traveller who wakes up in Boston in the year 2000, and his description of a new and orderly city offered a prophetic vision of what would eventually become the architecture of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893: Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fi ne buildings, for the most part not in continuous blocks but set in larger or smaller enclosures, stretched in every direction. Every quarter contained large open squares fi lled with trees, along which statues glistened and fountains fl ashed in the late-afternoon sun. Public buildings of a colossal size and architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles on every side. Surely I had never seen this city nor one comparable to it before. (Bellamy 1888: 18)

This description of wide boulevards and tall skyscrapers clearly pre-empts the designs of futuristic cities seen in the science fi ction fi lms of the 20s and 30s. Yet it was not only the look of the future that interested Bellamy; he wanted to set out the plans for an alternative society based on city planning, social theory, national and economic reform, education and a new welfare system. Such changes would only be possible through the reordering of society and the incorporation of new theories such as Frederick Taylor’s scientifi c management and the rationalisation of the labour system most famously employed by Henry Ford and the mass production of his Model T automobile. Assembly line production in the early twentieth century revolutionised the industrial workplace, and its effect on workers was critiqued in fi lms such as Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936).

Scenes showing Chaplin being swallowed by the giant cogs of the machine driving the production line refl ect contemporary concerns with industrialisation and the loss of individuality in American culture. Bellamy’s novel may have offered a model for an American social utopia, but the means through which this could be achieved threatened the very things that such a utopia was meant to ensure: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Cities not only provide a physical backdrop but also ‘the literal premises for the possibilities and trajectory of narrative action’ (Sobchack 1999: 123).

The urban science fi ction experience as portrayed in fi lm from the 1920s to the present day, according to Vivian Sobchack, offers a ‘historical trajectory—one we can pick up at a generic moment that marks the failure of modernism’s aspirations in images that speak of urban destruction and emptiness and that leads to more contemporary moments marked by urban exhaustion, postmodern exhilaration, and millennial vertigo’ (Sobchack 1999: 124). Indeed, the ways we have imagined our fi ctional cities are clear indicators of how we continue to interact with the changing urban landscape. Metropolis’s city, its design inspired by Fritz Lang’s visit to New York, is a mixture of modernist iconography, with its skyscrapers, airplanes and above street level highways, and dystopian decay, with its subterranean levels home to an enslaved underclass existing only to keep the city running for the elite class living above. This was the fi rst fi ctional depiction of a future city. Less than ten years later the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair showed what the real New York could look like in the not-too-distant future.

The exhibit gave people ‘the opportunity to enter the world of 1960. For Futurama [modelled by the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes] culminated in a life-size intersection of a city of tomorrow, complete with advanced-model autos (and an auto showroom), an apartment house, a theater, and a department store’ (Telotte 1999: 162). As J. P. Telotte surmises, those visitors to the exhibit must have felt as if they had walked onto the set of the latest science fi ction fi lm. Metropolis’s above ground city clearly predicts Bel Geddes’s modernist vision as it emphasizes transport, entertainment, and consumption.

We see inhabitants being marched through the city in ordered rows along mega highways and side-by-side with planes fl ying between skyscrapers, buildings in the nightclub district are covered in billboards advertising an extravagant lifestyle to the wealthy elite and beneath this all the workers toil to feed the vast furnaces that drive the city’s power. Metropolis, like those cities in Things to Come (1936) and Just Imagine (1930), is an ordered hierarchy of capitalist activity, with the workers going to and from work and goods being shipped to the rich high up amongst the skyscrapers. The ground is largely missing from the fi lm, except when the narrative takes the viewer to the scientist Rotwang’s laboratory. Nevertheless, the high-up city, the city of skyscrapers presented in the opening sequences, mirrors the Futurist interpretations of modern urban life where artists such as Umberto Boccioni ‘sought to capture the overall sensual cacophony of urban life and the way its varied forces interpenetrated one another’ (Highmore 2005: 142).

According to Douglas Tallack (2005: 84, italics mine), more than any other city, the real New York, as the template for the future city, has ‘inspired an ambition to see it all and catch its essence’; the challenge to artists, photographers, fi lmmakers, and architects was to ‘explore how, visually, part and whole relate or fail to relate when limited, local perspective on the city is chosen or accepted, and what to make of this relationship’.