No. 1 (2025): Southern transitions. Facing climate change and ecological degradation in the Global South
Saggi

L’ingombrate lascito dell’urbanistica modernista sulle geografie del Global South. Riflessioni a partire dal progetto di città utopica per Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India

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  • Cassandra Fontana
Cassandra Fontana
Dipartimento di Architettura, Università di Firenze, Italy
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/contest-16124

Published 2025-07-21

Keywords

  • becoming-with,
  • ecology,
  • self-government,
  • modernity,
  • socionature,
  • experimental utopia
    • ...More
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How to Cite

Fontana, C. (2025). L’ingombrate lascito dell’urbanistica modernista sulle geografie del Global South. Riflessioni a partire dal progetto di città utopica per Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India. Contesti. Città, Territori, Progetti, (1), 42–69. https://doi.org/10.36253/contest-16124

Copyright (c) 2025 Cassandra Fontana

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The essay investigates the legacy of modernist urbanism in Global South geographies through the case of Auroville (Tamil Nadu, India): an intentional community founded in 1968 and provided since then with an urban plan for a utopian city of 50,000 inhabitants. The investigation – conducted between 2017 and 2022 – highlights the conflict between a spatial utopia, embodied by the modernist urban plan, and the experimental utopia cultivated by the inhabitants through ecological practices of care and forms of self-government, to recognise the complicity of territorial planning in the dynamics of power reproduction typical of contemporary colonialism. 
By reconstructing the epistemological genealogy of the plan, the article highlights the link between modernity, nature/society dualism and spatial determinism, and introduces the perspective of an alternative modernity outlined by Sri Aurobindo, which forms the ethical basis of the Auroville experiment. The analysis of the process of space production – between abstract representations, governance configurations and situated practices – shows how the plan, conceived on a tabula rasa, now overlaps with a reforested, urbanised and socially complex territory, thus leading to the emergence of conflicts at different scales.
The Auroville case becomes a privileged observatory for understanding how the uncritical transposition of Western disciplinary paradigms endorses and reinforces logics of domination, revealing not only the crisis of democratic arenas but also the normalisation of imperialist logics within contemporary urban planning practice in the contexts of the Global South. In fact, the recent coercive imposition of the plan by the Indian Central Government – implemented through the unilateral reorganisation of governance bodies, the use of police, the demolition of self-managed spaces and the clearing of portions of forest – has highlighted how the contemporary construction of new towns is firmly based on imperialist ideologies, thus revealing the importance of developing an urban theory that advances alongside a theory of the State.

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