This paper interrogates the contemporary securitization of urban space through the conceptual triad of architecture, utopia and dystopia. It examines how cities have become sites of “super-controlled” environments, where surveillance, militarization, and data extraction are embedded in the very fabric of the built environment. Far from neutral, these spatial regimes reproduce and intensify social inequalities, concentrating power while eroding democratic life.
These developments will be situated within the 20th century theoretical production of architectural theories and utopian visions and will discuss the way artists, architects, filmmakers and writers have deployed dystopian accounts that remind us of the need to retain critical, cautionary thinking. Starting from canonical works such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984, moving on to the works of J.G.Ballard and China Miéville, the paper will also reach further to postwar architectural theoretical staples like Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture (Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis), Continuous Monument (Superstudio), No-Stop City (Archizoom Associati) and more. They all outline how architecture operates as an instrument of total control: transparent glass enclosures, rigid spatial grids, and omnipresent monitoring infrastructures embody utopian promises of order and efficiency while simultaneously producing alienation, discipline, and exclusion. These speculative environments prefigure today’s “smart” and securitized cities, where predictive policing, biometric systems, and militarized infrastructures extend techniques of war and counterinsurgency into everyday urban governance.
By placing literary and cinematic imaginaries in dialogue with contemporary urban practices, the paper argues that dystopian visions are not merely fictional exaggerations but critical anticipations of the present.
Aneta Vasileva holds a PhD in history and theory of architecture and specializes in post-World War II architecture and the preservation of architectural heritage. She teaches at the University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy.