Housing Communities between Islamic Freedom and Capitalist Kaleidoscope

Abstract

Throughout history, achieving the “Good Society” was a prime concern for many scholars in the Western culture. Plato’s normative theories embodied in The Republic initiated what was later called “Utopianism” which prompted the creation of the “Good Society” within the “Ideal City”. The concept of the “intentional community” was a manifestation of that dream. Since the Renaissance, many related urban theories emerged. However, with the fall of Modernity and its housing utopian theories in the 1960s, a new post-modern housing utopianism was created in the forms of “Housing Coopertaives”, “Co-housing”, “Condominiums”, “Ecovillages”, “Gated Communities”, and recently “New Urbanism” which emerged in the 1990s aiming at fulfilling the long awaited dream of the “Good Society”.This research critically examines such approaches at their “deep structure”, i.e. production mechanisms, property ownership, and administrative system, to prove that despite the apparent differences (in titles, territoral structure, and ownership patterns for example), they all stem from the same deep structure in terms of their driving mechanisms and general societal system, i.e. capitalism. In other words, all those approaches are bounded by the capitalist kaleidoscope.To explore this, a substantially different perspective that exists outside the boundaries of capitalism, such as that of Islam, is used to review those approaches. It was found that Islamic residential communities have achieved democracy, equity, justice and freedom more than contemporary capitalist housing communities. Islam, through its mechanisms, power structure and decision making process has achieved the Western dream of the “Good Society”, in its Western sense.