dystopia

Sabrina Franek
Senior Seminar
Dr. Brauer
1/5/11
Repressive Environments: Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World
When one thinks of the word “repression”, what oftentimes comes to mind is
something totalitarian: harsh laws, propaganda, surveillance, and police brutality.
However, there is a tool that can be used for repressive purposes that is not often
thought of: the very landscape and the architecture that surrounds us. In “Spaces of
Utopia and Dystopia: Landscaping the Contemporary City”, Gordon MacLeod and Kevin
Ward makes note of the growing concern of the landscape that is built around us is
slowly suppressing us. They state that:
This is captured in the growing body of work warning of a
‘fortiﬁed’, ‘authoritarian’ or ‘revanchist’ urban landscape,
characterized by mounting social and political unrest and
pockmarked with marginal interstices: derelict industrial
sites, concentrated hyperghettos and peripheral shanty
towns where the poor, the ‘socially excluded’ and the
homeless are shunted increasingly so as to facilitate the new
architectures of renaissance. (154)
They point to the crowded urban sprawls of Los Angeles, and the revanchist-like New
York City: a bustling place of constant change where the poor are being attacked

through “repressive state tactics” (162) to reclaim the places like the Lower East Side
for the wealthy and financially secure. Must we as a people support pushing out the
impoverished to areas that are specifically fit for only them? Must hyperghettos be made
on the outskirts of cities to keep the poor confined where we cannot see them, or should
we rather try to be inclusive. Should we rather plan for a welcoming city, rather than a
city that is designed to keep each class in their own pocket, with developed land tailored
for that specific class alone?
Imagine this: a world where architects are working as the propagandists are.
They build the scape to help confine the people into a massive hive-like environment.
Instead of being ethically responsible with city planning, the city is built as a place of
confinement and repression. It could be designed as a totalitarian place; fortified and
impervious to attack, foreboding and dominant. Or the city could instead be a place of
industry, neon lights, and distractions. The people within this scape? They are pacified,
distracted, desensitized, and therefore unaware that there is an underlying problem.
Therefore, there must be ethics in city planning, as the very landscape can be used to
crush out culture, to subdue the masses, and can be used to lock up the very individual.
The full extent of what can be done with architecture is ghastly, and can be seen in
many dystopian novels. Although fictitious, these imaginary worlds show the full extent
of architecture being used to repress everything that the individual stands for. The stark
opposites of architectural repression can be found within Aldous Huxley’s Brave New
World, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In one such work of fiction, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World offers the reader
glimpses into a futuristic world where science and industrialization have been allowed to

run amuck. The year is 632 A.F., or “After Ford”. The world seems to be a pleasant
utopia at first glance; the global population is permanently stabilized at two billion
people, there is an abundance of food, wealth, and material goods to be had by all, and
everyone is happy with their lives. There are golf courses, luxurious hotels, schooling
systems where students are trained efficiently to find the right niche after completing the
education program. In fact, everyone finds their jobs desirable; even the most mundane
of factory jobs has someone who feels like that is their perfect role in society. Maximum
output for any consumer good is hardly a problem, and the people have the money to
spend it.
However, there is a reason for this stabilization. The human beings within this
world are cloned into a specific caste system. The Alphas and Betas are unique to
themselves, and are the smartest in the bunch. These are the intellectuals, the
scientists, and the leaders within Brave New World. The Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons
have up to ninety-six twins, and are far less intelligent and physically strong than the
Alphas and Betas. They serve as the submerged, larger portion of the iceberg of
society, keeping the society afloat. Within this dystopia, everyone is happy due to a
sleep conditioning system known as “hypnopædia”, where they are brainwashed to love
the niche they are raised to serve within, while abhorring any other class outside of their
own. “Soma”, an antidepressant and hallucinogen that is given to all, puts the people in
a happy and relaxed state of high and well-being. People are encouraged to be sociable
through promiscuous sexual practices, and the lonely individual is shunned. The novel
focuses on several central characters, and their struggles as well as their pleasures
within this fictitious world; a beehive for the mind as well as the masses.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, however, directly
comes off as an oppressively totalitarian dystopia. “Big Brother” is “INGSOC’s”
commanding figurehead, short for English Socialism, the only party within the
government system. It is an oligarchy where the “Inner Party” elite are in control, the
“Outer Party”, the society’s middle class, is responsible for most of the governmental
grunt work, and the “proles”, short for proletariat, are the impoverished lower class. The
actual year to the main character, Winston Smith, is uncertain, only that he resides
within the vast country of Oceania. It is a dystopia where surveillance, propaganda, and
rationing is the norm. Here, it is normal for citizens to become “erased”, or to disappear
forever. There is a constant war, but who is really fighting who? No one can say, since
sometimes Oceania is at war with Eastasia, with Eurasia being Oceania’s ally. Or, is
Oceania allies with Eastasia, making the war against Eurasia? The purpose of this
ongoing war is to fight over the “disputed lands” in the middle, where slaves and war
criminals are taken captive. They are either tortured and killed for the fervent and
zealous pleasure of all, or are made to be the Inner Party’s servants as they are the
only ones to sit in the lap of luxury, free from rations.
Both Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four depict drastically different
dystopias that are centered in Britain. The novels are published only seventeen years
apart from each other, and both respectively are written by British authors. However, the
landscapes presented within both of these novels are completely different from one
another. By looking into the landscapes for both novels, one can see a different way that
architecture can be used to subdue the masses. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the scape is
described with enormous government buildings, and the sprawling rubbles of the urban

areas as: “Scattered about Longon there were just three other buildings of similar
appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that
from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously” (4).
Here, it is the size that is important, and well as the impenetrability. What individual,
made to feel isolated and captive by surveillance, would not feel daunted by looking up
at these giant edifices? Much like the surveillance cameras, the very government
buildings survey the land, a constant reminder of governmental power and control. The
exact opposite can be seen in Brave New World, a place where pleasure, industry, and
commerce is what oppresses the minds of the individuals. The landscape in London
feature “huge table-topped buildings”, and “a bed of geometrical mushrooms sprouting
from the green of park and garden. In the midst of them, thin-stalked, a taller, slenderer
fungus, the Charing-T Tower lifted towards the sky a disk of shining concrete”(61). The
distractions are bountiful, as can be seen in the following passage:
They were flying over the six kilometre zone of park-land that
separated Central London from its first ring of satellite
suburbs... Forests of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy towers
gleamed between the trees. Neat Shepherd’s Bush two
thousand Beta-Minus mixed doubles were playing Riemann-
surface tennis. A double row of Escalator Fives Courts lined
the main road from Notting Hill to Willesden. In the Ealing
stadium a Delta gymnastic display and community sing was
in progress. (62)

The individual, too distracted by not only soma, but by the very landscape and
entertainment complexes within, will never notice how the World State is using pleasure
as a form of control. There is no need to rebel if everyone is happy. The horror is that
everyone is happy while performing massive orgies, cloning people, dying in their ﬁfties
from a live-fast lifestyle, and no one cares one one person passes. More drones can be
made to take place of those that are on their way out.
To better understand the two different landscapes that are presented, and how
the landscapes are used as a form restraint, one need only discover how to properly
analyze a landscape, a room layout, or a piece of architecture. of In “Ideological
Criticism”, Sonja Foss uses the example of a building to argue her point that “virtually
any artifact can serve as an artifact for ideological criticism because ideologies exist
everywhere. Every artifact takes an evaluative position on various subjects simply by
the rhetorical choices that were made in creating that artifact” (214). She goes further to
state that such artifacts as buildings and landscape are far more important to study
since “audiences are often less resistant to ideological messages in such artifacts
because they do not expect to see them there, and such artifacts thus are often more
productive and interesting to analyze” (214). Foss states that “in visual artifacts,
physical features such as shapes and colors constitute presented elements. Whatever
form your artifact assumes, you are looking for observable aspects of the artifact that
provide clues to its ideology” (214). To better understand the power that the landscape
has, one must analyze every descriptive detail about the dominating structures in that
particular scape. This can help the reader of these novels discern not only the purpose
and function of these buildings, but the ways that just their appearance and placement

can be used as a means of control, working to maintain order and oppression within the
hive, just as any form of propaganda would.
I will first delve into the very government buildings themselves, or lack thereof.
Due to the fact that Aldous Huxley does not describe too many government buildings
within Brave New World, save for office spaces for directors in factories, as well as the
small governing buildings outside of the Savage Reservation, a place where uncivilized
people by Brave New World’s standards live in pueblos and take on life similar to that of
the Native Americans. The factories and the education centers, as well as everything
else, are government mandated. However, compared to buildings meant to enforce,
such as jailhouses, and offices to pass laws, it seems that none exist. Brave New
World’s World State motto, “community, identity, stability” can be seen on a shield on all
of these buildings, stating the goals of the World State. This is the only real sign of some
sort of authority or world order imbedded within the landscape, outside from Mustapha
Mond’s living arrangement, the current World Controller (1). This is a striking contrast to
Nineteen Eighty-Four’s oppressive signage of “Big Brother is watching you”, and
“INGSOC” posters (2). It would be a travesty to ignore these permanent and enduring
fixtures within the landscape, plastered on the buildings themselves. Brave New World’s
seems wholesome enough; a stable society, were the community is most important, as
well as a person’s identity. Nineteen Eighty-Four’s, however, has a poster of the ever
watchful Big Brother, an oppressive figurehead. The poster is found on almost every
wall, and is “contrived that the eyes follow you when you move” (2). Unlike Huxley’s
dystopia, Orwell’s slogans are plastered everywhere, and are the only source of color in
an otherwise bleak landscape:

Outside, even through the shut window pane, the world
looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were
whirling dust and torn paper into spirals... there seemed to
be no color in anything except the posters that were
plastered everywhere. The black-mustachio’d face gazed
down from every commanding corner... BIG BROTHER IS
WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes
looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level
another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind,
alternately covering and uncovering the single word
INGSOC. (2)
Whereas Brave New World is a place of synthetic color to mesmerize people into
submission, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has a gray landscape. That which pops out
are the coloration used on the propaganda poster, drawing the attention of anyone living
in this grimy place. Instead of too much color and lights to distract, there is a lack of
color, except in the things that are meant to attract attention. The theoretical architects
within Orwell’s novel have built a city much like the contemporary “hyperghettos”
described in MacLeod’s and Ward’s “Spaces of Utopia and Dystopia: Landscaping the
Contemporary City”. Brave New World’s city is more of the “revanchist” scape,
reclaiming in the need of civilization, where only reservations are left untouched due to
the fact that “civilized” people do not wish to live in that particular environment.
Rudolf B. Schmerl briefly remarked on the differences between Brave New World
and Nineteen Eighty-Four within his article, “The Two Future Worlds of Aldous

Huxley”. He states that “totalitarianism, real or fantastic, seems to engender two kinds
of servility: the servility of fear, strikingly portrayed in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four;
and an unconscious, even a happy servility, perfected by the methods of population
production in Brave New World” (332). He classiﬁes Brave New World as an “anti-
totalitarian fantasy, or perhaps more accurately as fantasy anti-totalitarian in its
anticipations” (330). Therefore, the fact that government buildings are more subdued
within the landscape, rather than towering and rigid, as is the case in Nineteen Eighty-
Four is expected. Orwell’s dystopia is far different, and within “The Architecture of
Repression: The Built Environment of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four” Gerald
S. Bernstein states that “the pessimistic image of an omnipotent government
oppressing the individual and creating a society of mass conformity pervades every
chapter of the novel” (26). Rather than control being subdued, it is pervading the
landscape within this dystopian society. The four Party buildings, Ministry of Truth
(concerned with the news and propaganda), Ministry of Love (concerned with law and
order), Ministry of Peace (the place of war strategy), and Ministry of Plenty (economic
affairs such as rationing), “dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of
Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously” (4). It is important to
study the landscape of dystopia, as Bernstein states that “Orwell’s dehumanized world
is not only the psychic environment that oppresses the individual but the physical
environment as well. For the architecture of Orwell’s ‘future’ function as a metaphor of
totalitarian repression” (26).
In “Utopia, Dystopia, and the Middle Class in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-
Four”, Robert Paul Resch claims that the purpose of this dystopia is “the destruction of

a middle-class individual by totalitarianism” (139). The structures within the landscape
are directly combined with propaganda and surveillance to shatter the people who are
made to be solitary. This sets up Oceania as “invulnerable to progressive
change” (139). Resch then mentions how the proles are seen as subhuman, and are
therefore conﬁned in the worst districts of the city. They are put in pockets, completely
cut off from the main government, with their own marketing systems and propaganda
made just for them, by kaleidoscope equipment that fashions together songs. The
Inner Party are sequestered in posh buildings, where miraculously the lifts still work. It
is the Outer Party, the middle class that must be subdued the most. For as Resch
points out, “they receive no beneﬁts for their service and no incentive for accepting
and reproducing the ideological values of the dominant class...the Outer Party are
unprivileged victims of oppressive acts for which they themselves are
responsible” (165). It is therefore the responsibility of the government ministries to
oppress the people, and their architectural design plays a huge part in it.
One architectural example of a rigid and controlling building within Nineteen
Eighty-Four is the Ministry of Truth. It is described as:
Startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an
enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete,
soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into
the air. From where Winston stood it was possible to read,
picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three
slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. (4)
In “Architecture of Repression”, Bernstein states that the novel “suggested an
impregnable fortress too strong to be stormed” (26). In the novel, Winston later states
that “a thousand rocket bombs would not batter it down” (27). Bernstein then refers to
the Ministry of Truth as “Ledoux-like”, and that “architecture became an analogy of
power” due to the fact that the Ministry of Truth dwarfed everything surrounding it, “just
as Big Brother towers above the Party and the people” (26-27). This description is
interesting due to the notion that this pyramid is “Ledoux-like”, since Ledoux was a
French architect who specialized in utopian city planning. The pyramid shape has a
whole new meaning to itself, as well. A symbol of transcendence and power, it can be
found on even the American dollar, an all seeing pinnacle. The party slogans, a
permanent fixture of the building itself, are paradoxes, thusly supporting the Party’s
notion of “doublethink”; what the Party says is true, must be true. As Winston later finds
out, if the Party states that two plus two make five, then it must be so. Therefore, the
paradoxes of the Party slogans must be true. And thus through the notion of
“doublethink”, a controlling pyramidal building that is entitled with “Truth” must work with
nothing but the truth, according to INGSOC, even if it is a place of propaganda, and the
erasing of history. By doing such work, the people are kept ignorant, as well as subdued
under the might of the Party. The ever domineering Ministry of Truth controls history,
and its size and shape is directly proportionate to its power.
The only other governmental structure within Orwell’s work that is described to
great detail is the Ministry of Love. From the outside it is “a place impossible to enter

except on ofﬁcial business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire
entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests” (4-5). On the inside, it is
ﬁlled with cells that have “walls of glittering white porcelain” (225). The lights are always
on, and it is impossible to tell if it is night or day, or even if one is above or below
ground. Everything is overly explained as white; the halls are white, the rooms are
white. Why is this color so important to this building? Sonja Foss stated in “Ideological
Criticism” in her steps to identify the ideologies behind an artifact that “the critic
articulates ideas, references, themes, allusions, or concepts that are suggested by the
presented elements. This is the step at which you identify the meanings suggested by
the elements that will serve as the basis for ideological tenets” (216). White brings about
an image of cleanliness, of purity, and of blankness. This would make sense, since
citizens go here to become “erased”, or nonexistent, just like the documents that
Winston shoves through the “memory hole”, a tube that leads to an incineration
chamber, in the Ministry of Truth. To erase is to wipe clean, to make blank again.
However, it is not just that. A very unique process happens within the Ministry of Love to
any citizen that wishes to act out as an individual.
O’Brien is the antagonist to Winston, and is responsible for Winston’s torture and
eventual confession of all of his crimes. To better prove the importance of the white
color that pervades this building, one need only read what O’Brien says to Winston
about the purpose of the Ministry of Love. He states that “nothing will remain of you: not
a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past
as well as in the future. You will never have existed” (254). Hence, the process of a
citizen being “erased”, which is tied to the blankness that is white. It goes deeper, as

O’Brien later describes that “by the time we had finished” with the prisoners, “they were
only shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had
done, and love of Big Brother... They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die
while their minds were still clean” (255). Back to white, now representing not only the
blankness and the emptiness of being erased, but of the blankness of the hollow shell of
the prisoner. It goes further to even represent the cleanliness and the purity of the minds
that now once again love Big Brother. This is the Ministry of Love’s purpose, and this is
the reason why white is so important to this building alone. As O’Brien stated it, “we
shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves” (256). When
someone enters this impenetrable building, one does not generally exit unless one
works there. It is well-guarded and intimidating from without, and from within. Here, an
individual disappears into the white spaces of nonexistence, a form of “civic
cleanliness”.
This stands a landscape of totalitarian repression. Here, architects work
alongside the government to shove the middle and lower classes into grimy urban areas
that are far from an ideal community. The buildings interact directly with the propaganda
and surveillance systems to create an area of confinement. The houses are falling to
pieces, and the labyrinth of alleyways sequester people to where they live and work. As
Bernstein stated in “Architecture of Repression”, Orwell’s description of the general
architectural condition of the city creates a visual image not far removed from the
corrugated roofed shanty towns on the fringe of today’s Brazilia” (26). There is nothing
freeing in this landscape, because it is meant to keep the worker bees trapped in its
hive. The people are struggling to maintain their collapsing homes, while the

government ministry buildings are so strong, that there is no possible way for their
destruction. What one sees is a country in constant warfare, but what is really under
attack? The government cannot get destroyed, for “a thousand rocket bombs” (27)
cannot destroy them. The houses and the people within are open to attack, and are
expendable, and susceptible to change. There are no architectural ethics to make the
urban landscape a better place as “repairs, except what you could do for yourself, had
to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending
of a window pane for two years” (20-21). It is rampant with decay, as the government
planners do not care about living conditions, only about the fortified ministries and their
impenetrability. The constant propaganda is not the only thing that is subduing the
people alone; it is the environment. With no great amount of architectural planning for
the urban areas, there is nothing but isolation for the individual inside a chaotic mess of
a city.
Within Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it is the factories that rule the
landscape. One such example is the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre.
It is the place where humans are made through cloning, and go through the first stages
of conditioning and brainwashing. It is highly efficient, much in the ways of Ford’s
assembly line, Ford being like a deity to the citizens. The inside of the building is a
“spidery steel-work of gallery above gallery faded away in all directions into the dark”,
and the workers are “red ghosts” that are “busily unloading demijohns from a moving
staircase” (11). Embryonic development takes place via an assembly line of machinery
focused on efficiency:

In the Bottling Room all was harmonious bustle and ordered
activity. Flaps of fresh sow’s peritoneum ready cut to the
proper size came shooting up in little lifts from the Organ
Store in the sub-basement. Whizz and then, click! the lift-
hatches flew open; the bottle-liner had only to reach out a
hand, take the flap, insert, smooth-down, and before the
lined bottle had had time to travel out of reach along the
endless band, whizz, click! another flap of peritoneum had
shot up from the depths, ready to be slipped into yet another
bottle, the next of that slow interminable procession on the
band. (9)
Another room further down the line is described as a “sultry darkness...like the darkness
of closed eyes on a summer’s afternoon” (11). In this room, “the bulging flanks of row on
receding row and tier above tier of bottles glinted with innumerable rubies, and among
the rubies moved the dim red spectres of men and women with purple eyes and all the
symptoms of lupus. The hum and rattle of machinery faintly stirred the air” (11).
In “The Two Future Worlds of Aldous Huxley”, Rudolf B. Schmerl has a lot to say
about the machinery process that makes up the Central London Hatchery and
Conditioning Centre. He states that Huxley starts his novel here because it is “the
logical beginning of an account of the society of the brave new world...with biology, and
with the very beginnings of biology at that” (328). He then discusses the important and
centralized two themes that are introduced within the opening description of the
Hatchery: “the theme of the first chapter is the biological foundation of the World State;

the theme of the second, the psychological super-structure erected on that
foundation” (328-329). What is important to notice is that the ﬁrst start of development
starts in the lower-most bowels of the basement, and slowly ascends upwards, until the
youth are put through hypnopædic schooling above ground.
However, there is a hidden theme found within Brave New World that Schmerl
points at. It is the theme of death. He states that:
The reader is presented with an elaborate, ironic image of
death - the light in the room about to be entered is dead and
frozen everywhere but along the yellow barrels of the
microscopes. The novel closes as it opens, with an image of
universal death: John’s feet, dangling in air after he has
hanged himself, are compared to “two unhurried compass
needles” (311), going through all the points of the compass.
Death is in all directions. The harmony of the World State is
the harmony of death. (331).
The machinery to clone has a macabre and deathly nature, yet is revered by the
populace. TheConditioning Centre inner-most depths is further described as moving
“slowly, majestically, with a faint humming of machinery, the Conveyors moved forward,
thirty-three centimetres an hour. In the red darkness glinted innumerable rubies” (56).
This paints a grim picture, yet people are conditioned and desensitized to enjoy this
environment. The people have lived their entire lives within this civilization, and know of
nothing else. Therefore, the environment directly shaped their understanding of what is
considered to be civilization. The main characters are so shaped and inﬂuenced by the

surroundings that when they do visit the wilderness outside of a city, they abhor it, and
feel unnerved by it; they wish to go back to stability and happiness brought to them by
soma and their environment.
In Brave New World, the machinery gives birth to the people, then they enjoy
happy lives with dopamine overload. Everything is tailored to specific castes, including
the newspapers and the entertainment industry, which works hand-in-hand with
propaganda messages. The main central location for the entertainment world is
described as;
The Hourly Radio, an upper-caste sheet, in pale green
Gamma Gazette, and, on khaki paper and in words
exclusively of one syllable. The Delta mirror. Then came the
Bureaux of Propaganda by Television, by Feeling Picture,
and by Synthetic Voice and Music respectively - twenty-two
floors of them. Above were the research laboratories and the
padded rooms in which the Sound-Track Writers and
Synthetic Composers did their delicate work. The top
eighteen floors were occupied by the College of Emotional
Engineering. (66)
Unlike Nineteen Eighty-Four, the colors found within Brave New World, as
exemplified in the colored paper that the various papers are on, serve a different
purpose other than commanding everyone’s attention by being starkly different than the
otherwise gray landscape. In Brave New World, various parts of the landscape are
divided into various colors because the caste systems are conditioned to like particular

colors. Therefore, this is used to taylor magazines and tools of propaganda specific to
that caste. To go even further, they would be ushered to certain buildings specific to
their caste. What this sets up is an environment where each caste is confined to certain
areas of the city through a pleasant association with color and members of their own
caste, and therefore the caste members are made more unwilling to blend in with those
of other castes.
Upon death, the people within Huxley’s Brave New World once again join
machine within another factory for another grim yet efficient purpose. They are sent to
the “majestic buildings” of the Slough Crematorium, with its “four tall chimneys...flood-
lighted and tipped with crimson danger signals. It was a landmark” (73). The reasoning
behind everyone being sent here it to recover phosphorous from their bodies to help
make plants grow. After death, people are put back into the cogs of the machine within
the environment to be “socially useful” (73). Brave New World is therefore a world where
the people are born from machines, work on machines, and die on machines. The goal
is simple; to keep the hive stable and efficient. How are they able to live this way? As
Joanne Woiak pointed out within “Designing a Brave New World: Eugenics, Politics, and
Fiction”, the people “can live out their lives... without once being solitary, without once
making a serious mental effort, without once being out of sight or sound of some ready-
made distraction” (113). This world is meant to be a place “to train up a race, not of
perfect human beings, but of perfect mass-producers and mass-consumers” (117)
Therefore, to keep people happy with this seemingly monotonous and grim fact that
people are governed by the assembly line process, there will always be a dominant and

luring entertainment industry and consumer hotspots, a central part of the environment
past the factories.
The eerily unsettling ﬁctitious landscapes that feel so real to the reader within
Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are horrifying because of their ability to
remind us that landscape can be used against us, and in some cases already have.
Just as people within Brave New World are unsettled when they have to visit an
environment that is not tailored to their caste, and in Nineteen Eighty-Four when certain
citizens, by right of their party are not meant to be seen in certain locations, such as
markets run by the proles, Gordon MacLeod and Kevin Ward state within “Spaces of
Utopia and Dystopia: Landscaping the Contemporary City”:
In today’s cities... Residents from all social groups have a
sense of exclusion and restriction. For some, the feeling of
exclusion is obvious, as they are denied access to various
areas and are restricted to others. Afﬂuent people who
inhabit exclusive enclaves also feel restricted; their feelings
of fear keep them away from regions and people that their
mental maps of the city identify as dangerous. (153)
MacLeod and Ward point to the fact that the idea of a dystopian city, at least in terms of
architectural planning and landscaping is not far off, for careful planning has not been
executed to make the city more welcoming and ideal for the populace. They state that
these “dystopian spaces that are, to all intents and purposes, physically proximate but
institutionally estranged” where vibrancy in landscape leads directly to “indifferent
worlds and detached lifestyles” (154). They point to marketplaces and public spaces

that “offers an ambience purported to encourage social interaction and the re-integration
of the city and market” (155), and that “consumption and entertainment are thereby
folded together” (156).
With the description given by MacLeod and Ward in “Spaces of Utopia and
Dystopia”, one can imagine the very landscape of Brave New World, slowly taking over.
What happens if it does? As these authors suggested, it leads to “indifferent worlds and
detached lifestyles” (154), far from ideal. What can be seen within Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World can in part be witnessed in our own world, concerning landscaping. A
part of Orwell’s hyperghettos, a place where the proles struggle to survive under
oppressive architecture can also be seen, particularly in cities such as Los Angeles.
If one were to use the characters that have to live under the conditions depicted
in these novels as examples to what may happen when the cityscape is used to herd
certain classes into particular pockets of the city, then perhaps the answer to why
effective and ethical city planning is important becomes clear. The characters within
both Aldous Huxley’s and George Orwell’s novels that do not ﬁt the mainstream social
mold are far from happy. They are crushed and conﬁned in a city that has no place for
them. What happens to them, as can be seen in both novels, is that they are pushed out
from a revanchist city that constantly works to reclaim itself for the masses of happy
worker bees alone. In Huxley’s world, those that are too different to accept the ways of
civilized life are sequestered to islands, and are out of sight, out of mind. In Orwell’s
world, death is the only way for escape.
These novels can teach us something about our culture as a whole. We wish to
stay isolated, to feel safe in urban neighborhoods and communities that are built like

microcosms, where everything we want and need is a simple walk away. We only feel
safe dealing with our own class in society, as the landscaping helps perpetuate. The rich
prefer staying within their gated communities. The middle class, oftentimes working for
the rich, tend to live right outside of those communities. The poor? They are pushed as
far away as possible, with their own little microcosm, as can be seen in Los Angeles’s
hyperghettos: a land of impoverished buildings and impoverished souls. Must we
subject ourselves to this sort of city planning, where the individual is stiﬂed and pushed
under to make it better for the whole? Or can we not plan for an all inclusive city,
welcoming and safe to everyone?
Works Cited:

Bernstein, Gerald S. "The Architecture of Repression: The Built Environment of George
Orwell's 1984." Journal of Architectural Education 38.2 (1985): 26-28. JSTOR.
Web. 24 Oct. 2011. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1424815>.
Foss, Sonja. "Ideological Criticism." Rhetorical Criticism (2004): 209-21. Print.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper & Bros., 1946. Print.
MacLeod, Gordon, and Kevin Ward. "Spaces of Utopia and Dystopia: Landscaping the
Contemporary City." Geograﬁska Annaler, Series B: Human Geography 84.3-4
(2002): 153-70. Print.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty Four. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1949.
Print.
Resch, Robert P. "Utopia, Dystopia, and the Middle Class in George Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-Four." Boundary 2 24.1 (1997): 137-76. JSTOR. Web. 24 Oct. 2011.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/303755>.
Schmerl, Rudolf B. "The Two Future Worlds of Aldous Huxley." PMLA 77.3 (1962):
328-34. JSTOR. Web. 24 Oct. 2011. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/460493>.
Woiak, Joanne. "Designing a Brave New World: Eugenics, Politics, and Fiction." The
Public Historian 29.3 (2007): 105-29. JSTOR. Web. 30 Nov. 2011. <http://
www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/tph.2007.29.3.105>.

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