Abstract

This article tackles the critical approaches to urbanism as power-knowledge developed since the 1960-1970 based on the instruments of semiological and psychoanalytical analysis. From this viewpoint, we come back to the classic analyses of F. Choay on the mechanisms of utopia – as in the case of Thomas More’s Utopia, also a turning point – as textual fathering matrix and matrix of urban writings in terms of modernist architecture and the constitution of urban rationality. We particularly try to update the unique articulation operated between textual process and spatial projection: making the hypothesis that the impossibility to unify the graphical space of significances and the purposeful space of movements defines the place of an “urban unconscious”, we analyze the means of utopian writing to force this impossible unification and the repressing tendencies that reoccur both in the text and the city and symptomatically touch building desires, historicity, and spatial inscription of power.