Dreaming the new atlantis: Science and the planning of technopolis, 1955-1985

This paper examines the relationship between science and the design of French research park initiatives during the mid- to late twentieth century. The new technopolis, as created in cities such as Grenoble, Toulouse, and Sophia-Antipolis, functioned as an iconographic map of modem scientific endeavor. Its uniform composition, its rational analysis and arrangement of space, and its symbolic architectural form located scientific practices within the cultural and territorial orbit of provincial utopia. Technopolis offered the scientific community as the ideal of modern life and the scientist as the archetypical "modern man."