Utopian Visions in the American Southwest

Due to the government shutdown earlier this month, a long awaited trip to the Southwest to see some of its most famous landmarks (Grand Canyon National Park, Mesa Verde National Park, and Lake Powell) turned into an improvised route through lesser known yet equally compelling landscapes and cultural heritage sites. The latter, which are either state parks, on Native American reservations, or under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management — hence independent of federal closures — are often harder to access and off the typical touristic circuits.

Visiting sites such as Canyon de Chelly in Arizona and Monarch Cave in Utah made me aware of how rich the archaeological history of the region is, the diversity of both sites and monumental landscapes. The isolation of these less frequented sites is what makes them really stand out, allowing visitors a more intimate interaction with both grand spaces and the architectural remains, petroglyphs, pictographs, and artifacts of civilizations past. This utopian experience would be fundamentally altered if they became highly-visited attractions as is the case of the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, and other nearby national parks.

Within that context, Arizona’s partially-realized experimental community of Arcosanti provided me an ideal point of contemplation. Paolo Soleri’s urban design for Arcosanti presents a plan philosophically grounded in societal self-sufficiency and sustainability; our contemporary dilemma being collective survival long term, rather than the more immediate concerns earlier civilizations were formed around.