by LDV Studio Urbain
Some dream of an apartment bathed in light, a stone’s throw from cafes and bookstores. Others of a house surrounded by greenery, far from the hustle and bustle of the city, with a garden to grow tomatoes and flowers. These ostensibly opposing desires have been running through our societies for centuries and reflect great collective ideas: technical progress, individualism, social equality or a return to nature. Living is not just about housing: it is about choosing a living environment that reflects our values and desires.
Since ancient times, the city has fascinated as much as it repels. For the Greeks and Romans, the city was much more than a place to live: it was the heart of political, cultural and religious life. Aristotle saw in the polis the natural framework of “living together”, where man could fulfill his social nature. At the same time, Plato and Cicero were already criticizing it as a space where diseases and social tensions accumulate. This ambivalence has provided inspiration for many utopias through the ages and still runs through our urban imaginations today.
Between urbanity and nature
In the 19th century, with the upheavals of the industrial revolution, cities that had become unhealthy gave rise to a hygienist movement: air and water had to be purified and a healthier environment had to be provided for the physical and moral well-being of the inhabitants. The industrialist Jean-Baptiste Godin embodied this ideal by building the Familistère de Guise in order to offer the working class “the equivalent of wealth in comfort”. This “workers’ paradise”, organized as a cooperative, included spacious and well-ventilated housing, schools, a theatre, public baths and gardens. Godin thus denounced the ideal of small houses, which he considered a symbol of rural poverty.
In the same spirit of escape from congested cities, Ebenezer Howard imagines garden cities: small green cities reconciling nature, agriculture and urban services. This utopia, which combines autonomy and solidarity, inscribes the village spirit in a modern narrative.
Between power and freedom
But architecture can also become an instrument of power. In the 20th century, some authoritarian regimes designed urban complexes to assert their domination. Constructions inspired by Roman classicism, such as monumental arches, wide boulevards and squares intended for huge gatherings, structured the districts and imposed a spatial hierarchy. In Rome, the EUR district under Mussolini, and the Germania project imagined by Albert Speer for Berlin, are punctuated by large monuments that remind us of the smallness of the people in the face of power. In the USSR, the massive Stalinist buildings organized housing around functionality and density, mixing productivism and demonstration of grandeur.
In response to these collective models, the peri-urban pavilion developed as a symbol of individual accomplishment. Inspired by the dream of the “white picket fence”, it embodies the ideal of autonomy and freedom. Each family has its own house, garden and private property, providing a setting where they can organize their space and activities as they wish. This model reflects new cultural values: intimacy, personal comfort and social mobility.
At the same time, technical progress continues to nourish our vision of the ideal habitat, today through futuristic and high-tech projects. Neom, in Saudi Arabia, is an ultra-connected city for a privileged minority, while in Dubai, entire neighborhoods are built on water. These projects show how an elite continues to impose an ideal that is often inaccessible, even destructive, for the majority.
Utopia is plural
These visions remind us that the ideal habitat cannot be reduced to a simple technical model: it is above all narrative and symbolic. For Jean Viard, it would be natural for upward populations to still aspire to individual housing. While some of the wealthiest become neo-rurals living in tiny houses, in search of simplicity and ecology, a large part of the population has never experienced the comfort of suburban housing.
Researcher Alice Carabédian rightly insists on the importance of not conceiving of utopia as a dualistic model, between living in a hut under the ruins of an alienated world or in a sanitized spaceship in orbit. Herein lies the ingenuity of Ursula Le Guin’s science-fiction novel The Dispossessed, which creates a permanent dialogue between a world of individual freedom and a world of collectivist anarchists, where the characters will doubt themselves. To remain fruitful, utopias must therefore embody, and even create, contradictions and dissensus in order to open up new imaginaries.
Thus, there is no single form of ideal housing. Rather, they are a multiplicity of narratives and ideologies that reflect our relationships to the collective, to nature, to comfort, and to power. To live, ultimately, as Mona Chollet reminds us, is perhaps not a question of finding the perfect place or architecture, but of inventing together ways of feeling at home and appropriating the space of everyday life.
French original: “Quand l’habitat idéal raconte nos sociétés,” Demain La Ville, October 13, 2025. This translation by Secessio.
Secessio 