How can people and animals live alongside each other? How should land and resources be distributed in society? People searched for answers to these questions in both literary and built utopias from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and utopian projects were ways of developing and testing out alternative models for society. The new designs for islands, settlements, cities, or mining projects that they contained were generally a response to criticism of contemporary conditions. I aim to show that non-human entities were part and parcel of such projects, though they have often been overlooked. Whether found in literature or implemented in practice, early modern schemes for better collective living are teeming with animals, plants, and minerals—as well as buildings and infrastructure designed to control them. In order to explore these kinds of utopian ecologies, which address humans in their relationships with organisms and infrastructures, I employ an approach based in transnational microhistory. My goal is to understand local utopian projects—whether a book, a mining project, or the founding of a new colonial city—in their global contexts.
One of my starting points was a plan of Philadelphia from the second half of the eighteenth century (see Figure 1 above). The construction of the city, planned as a centre for the newly founded British colony of Pennsylvania, had begun back in the 1680s. Drawn up around eighty years later by the then Surveyor General, the ‘plan of the improved part of the city’ shows the existing buildings, as well as two urban green spaces.
Unlike the houses, the plan’s author makes it clear that the parks do not actually exist. Two small labels indicate that they have been drawn ‘according to Holmes’ plan’, referring to the first map of the new city, produced in 1683 (see Figure 2 below). The parks reflect a green urban utopia—one that was lifted from the original seventeenth-century design for a still unbuilt city, and grafted onto the map of an actually existing eighteenth-century city.
What we see here is the simultaneous presence of multiple temporalities and modes of existence on one map. It presents a fantasy of what the city should look like. The insertion of green spaces matches the classic definition of a utopia: it refers to an idea of an ordered space, and thus of a society, but it also seems to establish a distinction between current and desired conditions.
My project aims to show that the fantasy we find on this map was connected to a broader transatlantic network of utopian ideas and practices. Examples can be found on either side of the Atlantic of concepts and initiatives that inspired and influenced the growth of Philadelphia, and which can be called ‘utopian’ in the sense defined above.
During the course of my research so far, it has become increasingly apparent that utopian projects like Philadelphia served as laboratories for a changing early modern oeconomia. Oeconomia was the prevailing economic idea of the time; put simply, it placed the oikos, or household, at the heart of all relationships, taking in people, organisms, objects, and artefacts. Utopian projects thus not only served to formulate radical alternatives to the contemporary socio-political order, but also dealt with the relationship between humans and nature.
‘Holy Experiments’ and the Coloniality of Utopian Projects
For William Penn, the English Quaker who founded Pennsylvania, the colony and the city of Philadelphia really were ‘holy experiments’. The relationship between God, people, and the non-human environment played a crucial role in utopian projects like Philadelphia. The connection between religion and ecology was rooted in a transatlantic network of Protestant utopias. As a whole, the vision of a ‘city of refuge’1 for religious minorities and persecuted people was strongly influenced by a German-speaking intellectual tradition, including works such as Johannes Valentinus Andreae’s utopia Christianopolis (1619). Premodern notions that nature possessed a soul meant that some early modern utopias still placed strict limits on the domination of humans and of non-human entities. However, this was not always the case; indeed, one exception can be found in the utopia that gave the genre its name. In Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the colonization of neighbouring regions and people is depicted as a suitable means of remedying shortages in natural resources.
William Penn’s plans for his North American colony and the city of Philadelphia were inspired by More’s Utopia. His idea of a city of refuge envisaged peaceful encounters between Europeans and indigenous Americans in a lush natural environment. Yet the expansionist undertones of More’s vision also influenced his plans. For this reason, my project will examine how utopias contributed to the construction of ‘Protestant empires’,2 as well as to their practices of state formation and their ideas of the colonial future.
Private Property and the Commons; or: Disorder in the Grid
William Penn planned Philadelphia with utopian ideas of shared ownership and collective resource use in mind; yet the city remained his private possession, built on land that he had been given by King Charles II in order to settle royal debts. The grid was a pattern of property structures that first allocated the ownership of the different houses in advance, then documented it. Over time, this grid expanded to cover the whole colony of Pennsylvania and produced drastic changes to its cultural landscape, which had previously been shaped by the cultivation techniques of the indigenous Lenape, including hunting, slash-and-burn agriculture, and arable farming.
Until the mid eighteenth century, however, forests and fields continued to extend into the urban grid, though most of the city existed only on maps and had not yet been built. As a matter of principle, Penn claimed ownership of all areas that had not been sold or surveyed. In the early eighteenth century, he forbid the designation of any common land – that is, freely accessible agricultural areas owned by local residents. When it came to the planned green spaces in the city, however, he seemed to think that they ought to remain in public ownership in order to further the moral improvement of urban living conditions, and so he left two of them to the city. Unexpectedly, however, the city’s inhabitants gained access to the parks and used them for various forms of common agriculture, including as grazing meadows, until the late eighteenth century. In doing so, they exercised their ‘right of the commons’, which had been imported from England. In addition, parts of the south-eastern park were used as a communal grave and a cattle market. In yet another section, free and enslaved African Americans were permitted to bury their dead and to assemble for festivals.
Regardless of how green spaces were used, Philadelphians ultimately did not want them to be removed altogether. In 1751, when Penn’s son sought to have one of the parks replaced by an extension to the hospital, the responsible authorities rejected the proposal, ‘[a]s it is a part of a square allotted by the late Honorary Proprietary for public purposes, as the old maps of the city will show’. A few years later, the City Council commissioned Nicholas Scull’s map of the city, reproduced above, so that ‘the publick Squares laid down in the original Plan of the City’ and ‘the Claim of the Inhabitants of the said City thereto may not be prejudiced.’ William Penn’s utopian plan thus once again became influential—this time in order to counter his son’s later plans for the future of the city.
Translated by Jozef van der Voort (GHIL).
Feature image: Detail of ‘To the Mayor, Recorder, Aldermen, Common Council, and Freemen of Philadelphia This Plan of the Improved Part of the City Surveyed and Laid Down by the Late Nicholas Scull . . .’, 1762. Library of Congress, Washington. Public Domain.
- Michael J. Lewis, City of Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning (Princeton, 2016). [↩]
- Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia, 2009). [↩]
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Mirjam Hähnle (July 27, 2026). Life Squared: Early Modern Utopian Ecologies. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved August 15, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/16ma0