Metaverse Cities. Deconstructing a glossy urban dystopia

Recent years have seen the rise of some early attempts to construct virtual cities, affective utopias or dystopias in an embodied internet, which in some respects seems as the ultimate expression of the neoliberal model applied to the urban project, even if virtual. Although there is an extensive disciplinary literature on the relationship between planning and virtual reality related to the gaming industry, it often avoids imaginaries and values issues. The investigation of some of these early experiences - Decentraland, Minecraft, Liberland Metaverse, to name a few - raises important questions and issues that are gradually becoming inescapable for architects, and urban planners, and allows us to make some partial considerations on the risks and potentialities of these early virtual cities. Even if Metaverse cities are seen by many as an utopian fancy refuge - for an elite class - in an 'end of the world' scenario, like that of the present, these first experiments of virtual cities paradoxically seem to re-propose consolidated physical cities urban issues: from spatial and socio-economic inequalities, to large privatisation processes, touristification, redlining, land speculation, iper-fragmentation, ecc. Contemporary utopias or dystopias, what are these new virtual cities? The construction of a better city and a better world has obsessed architects and urban planners since always. Virtual reality gives us this possibility but it would seem to re-propose well-rooted techno-capitalistic imaginaries and issues of the contemporary neoliberal-model city. And it opens up a serious reflection on the need for new imaginaries, a radical “politics of the imagination”, also for virtual territories.