Ideal City Revisited, Alex Josephson

The interview revisits a timeless question that has taken on renewed urgency: the idea of the ideal city. Far from being obsolete, the concept remains a vital source of inspiration—especially in the context of building a more sustainable and humane urban future.

Drawing on historical models of planned cities, the conversation situates these ideas within a contemporary Canadian context. Two projects developed by Josephson and his team are presented as case studies: Innisfil and The Hearn.

Innisfil can be understood as an “ideal city on the ground”—a masterplanned urban model that combines two classical frameworks: the utopian concentric circle (garden city plan) and the Roman grid. The project engages core questions of infrastructural integration, urban life, including building typologies, scale, density, and neighbourhood structure.

In contrast, The Hearn—a former power plant once among the largest in North America—represents a different approach. Rather than expanding outward, it proposes a radical form of adaptive reuse: transforming a single building into a self-contained urban environment. In this sense, it becomes a vessel for cohabitation—a city within a structure. The project can be read in dialogue with the unrealized ambitions of Cedric Price’s Fun Palace—not as a direct lineage, but as a shared intellectual territory in which architecture operates as an open-ended framework for occupation, transformation, and collective life. Like the Fun Palace, The Hearn suggests a shift away from static form toward architecture as an enabling system—capable of hosting evolving programs, social dynamics, and forms of participation over time.

Together, these two projects frame alternative ways of rethinking the ideal city today: one as a ground-up urban system, the other as an internalized, architectural one.