In the decades after 1800 a group of reformers later labelled utopian socialists proposed planned communities as a remedy for the misery of industrial society. Charles Fourier designed the phalanstere, a single large building housing a cooperative community of roughly 1,600 people; Robert Owen built a model factory village at New Lanark and promoted self-contained communities of around 1,200; and Henri de Saint-Simon called for a society directed by industrialists and engineers. Their schemes combined detailed architectural and social prescription, treating the design of buildings and settlements as the means of reforming human relations. Several were actually attempted, from New Harmony to later Fourierist colonies.
It established the idea that a designed community could engineer a better society, a conviction that fed directly into the garden city, the workers' colony and modernist housing. The phalanstere and New Lanark became enduring models for collective living and planned reform.