The megastructures envisioned in the 1950s and 60s were solutions to the problems the world faced around this period. There was an immense need for housing after the Second World War and at the same time an enormous growth of population. The conventional methods of city planning were not considered as being able to cope with the problems of that era. At the same time, there was also a strong believe, that technology could solve these problems. This led to the creation of utopian cityscapes, which can indeed be described as an avant-garde of urban planning. Most of these structures however, remained on paper.
When analysing the different megastructures, we found some similarities – not only in appearance and execution but also in the thoughts behind. The following two chapters present a personal categorisation of the underlying concepts. All the categories to be found were defi ned by us as a part of our research.