Industrially speaking, there are three sections in Christianopolis.
One of them is devoted to agriculture and animal husbandry. Each of
these departments has appropriate buildings, and directly opposite them
is a rather large tower which connects them with the city buildings;
under the tower a broad vaulted entrance leads into the city, and a
smaller one to the individual houses. The dome of this tower roofs
what we should call a guildhall, and here the citizens of the quarter
come together as often as required to “act on sacred as well as
civil matters.” It is plain that these workers are not sheep led by
wise shepherds, as in the Republic, but the members of autonomous,
self-regulating groups.
The next quarter contains the mills, bake-shops, meat-shops, and
factories for making whatever is done with machinery apart from
fire. As Christianopolis welcomes originality in invention, there
are a variety of enterprises within this domain; among them, paper
manufacturing plants, saw mills, and establishments for grinding
and polishing arms and tools. There are common kitchens and wash
houses, too; for, as we shall see presently, life in this ideal city
corresponds to what we experience today in New York, London, and many
another modern industrial city.
The third quarter is given over to the metallurgical industries, as
well as to those like the glass, brick, and earthenware industries
which require constant fire. It is necessary to point out that in
planning the industrial quarters of Christianopolis, these seventeenth
century Utopians have anticipated the best practice that has been
worked out today, after a century of disorderly building. The
separation of the city into zones, the distinction between “heavy”
industries and “light” industries, the grouping of similar industrial
establishments, the provision of an agricultural zone adjacent to the
city--in all this our garden cities are but belated reproductions of
Christianopolis.
Moreover, in Christianopolis, there is a conscious application of
science to industrial processes; one might almost say that these
artisans believed in efficiency engineering; for “here in truth
you see a testing of nature herself. The men are not driven to a
work with which they are unfamiliar, like pack-animals to their
task, but they have been trained before in an accurate knowledge of
scientific matters,” on the theory that “unless you analyze matter by
experiment, unless you improve the deficiencies of knowledge by more
capable instruments, you are worthless.” The dependence of industrial
improvement upon deliberate scientific research may be a new discovery
for the practical man, but it is an old story in Utopia.
4
What is the character of this artisan democracy? The answer to this
is summed up in one of those sayings that Andreæ, in the midst of his
energetic exposition, drops by the way.
“To be wise and to work are not incompatible, if there is moderation.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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