The Flawed Perfection of the Contemporary City : A study in the contemporary city's utopia and tradition with the example Malmö

The purpose of this essay is to investigate contemporary urbanism through the theories of Collage City and Karl Popper’s theories on utopia and tradition, further, to exemplify Malmö in this context. The essay employs several urban theories to understand the discourse of contemporary urbanism. The study has been done based on the theoretical basis of the essay since the goal has been to understand urban utopia and tradition. The method examines the theory and practice of contemporary urbanism to see whether the selected theories have any relevance to the current urban debate. Tradition can be viewed as the incomplete old theories on which the myth of society rests. Utopia wants to predict the future which in short is unreasonable since man does not possess such ability. The creation of the abstract good always results in repression according to Popper. The central aspects of urban theory consist of environment, economics and social justice, which here are treated with an emphasis on economics. Since the economic crisis of the 1970s, neoliberalism's market economy has shown hegemonic in capitalist countries. In practice, the environment and the economy are prioritized while social justice is neglected. This applies significantly to Malmö where construction takes place without dialogue with the inhabitants of poor areas, while the construction of privileged blocks is done actively through cooperation. In understanding the idea of the contemporary city, utopia and tradition are sufficiently helpful to at least uncover parts of the urban ideological constitution, however, the theories need to be complemented by additional contemporary theories to successfully articulate current urban discourses