They're scattered all over Greater Boston. But you don't usually notice them. They've merged, over the decades, almost seamlessly into their surroundings.

They're the model neighborhoods. Each was somebody's idea of Utopia: the once-and-for-all ideal American community. Each was carefully planned and designed in an era that believed in the ability of brains and good intentions to make a better world.

The oldest date from the 19th century, the newest perhaps from the 1970s, certainly no later. Some were built for veterans, some for factory workers, some for the country-club set. Some are still intact. Some have largely disappeared. Some were never finished.

Woodbourne, in Jamaica Plain. Oak Hill Park, in Newton. Fisher Hill, in Brookline. Billerica Garden Suburb. Spring Hill, in Somerville. Larchwood, in Cambridge. Quincy Point. Maybe two dozen others.

If you're sharp, you can still spot them. There may be a funny twist to the street layout. Or an English-cottage look to the houses. Or an indefinable feeling of community. Something tells you yu've wandered onto sacred turf.

The headlines in the old newspapers convey the mood. "Billerica as a Workers' Paradise," trumpeted the Boston Evening Transcript on May 16, 1914. ''Boston to Solve Model Tenement Problem in West Roxbury," boasted the Boston American on December 11, 1911. "Oak Hill Park, Newton's Answer to the Veteran's Housing Problem," read the Newton Villager on May 18, 1950.

The Boston Utopias were mostly created to help people become homeowners. Apparently, if you didn't own your home, you weren't quite fully American. A good example is the following declaration. It was published in 1920 as the keynote of the "book of homes" supplement of a Boston newspaper:

Own Your Own Home Resolution

"I believe in the American home and its eternal power for good; I believe that it is my individual duty and privilege to own a home under the Stars and Stripes; I believe that Boston is one of the great home cities of the world; I solemnly resolve to make my best efforts during 1920 to become a homeowner in this great city, and thereby satisfy the cravings of my own heart and the desire of those dear to me in life; to make my own prosperity more secure, and also to stimulate through home ownership the industrial and commercial life of my own city."

Call that hype, if you want. Call it cynical manipulation, say it sounds like Newt Gingrich bingeing on Dr. Pepper, claim it's sentimental hogwash. It's all of that. But it's also an unembarrassed hymn of belief in a shared ethic, a shared sense of community.

The Boston Utopias were all built in the suburbs, or what were suburbs at the time. The case against suburbs is well known. Suburbs sprawl over farm and forest, blighting the land. They sort life into environments so bland that they make you sick: the mall, the office park, the gated condo pod. Nothing ever happens in a suburb except on the television screen. They rely too much on a single means of travel, the private car. The car system requires huge government subsidies, in the form of highways and other services; it imprisons everyone too young or too poor to drive (nearly half of all Americans); it leads in the end to congestion so horrible that drivers on Los Angeles' freeways take guns and shoot one another out of sheer frustration.

The antisuburb rap, whether you buy it or not, is the best reason for visiting the forgotten Utopias. To do so is to realize there are suburbs and suburbs. It is to immerse yourself, with wonder and admiration, in the idealism and energy of an earlier America.

Lois Craig is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has devoted much effort to rediscovering the Boston Utopias and to creating a video archive on the subject at MIT's Rotch Library. "They were places where a lot of energy went into the creation of an ideal," says Craig. "They were part of an international movement to recapture the healthy virtues of the country within an urban setting."

We'll briefly visit just four of them. We'll notice that each one was regarded by its sponsors as something more than an investment opportunity. Each was thought of as an act of social responsibility. Each would be a ''solution" to the housing problem, a solution that would be ''scientific," to use that wonderfully meaningless word, which crops up all the time in descriptions of the Utopias, always expressing a deep, vague faith -- a faith we have now lost -- in the perfectibility of the world.

Woodbourne

Woodbourne is a hilly enclave of little streets that climb and twist among mostly stucco cottages in a tiny corner of the Forest Hills section of Jamaica Plain, between Hyde Park Avenue and the Forest Hills Cemetery, just a short walk from the Arnold Arboretum.

This was "workers' housing," started in 1912 on 30 acres (by way of comparison, Boston Common -- not including the Public Garden -- is about 50 acres). There were 150 houses, or at least that's how many were planned. With all these communities, you can never be quite sure how many actually got built. Each house cost about $5,000, financed by the development company at $50 per month.

You can tell you're in Woodbourne by the street names: Bourne, Northbourne, Southbourne, Eastbourne, Westbourne, Westbourne Terrace, Bournedale. Yes, it's confusing.

As usual, the keenest whiff of the past rises from the contemporary newspapers. Here's The Boston Traveler for December 19, 1911:

"Not to be outdone in the matter of civic improvements, Boston people interested in the proper housing of the city's great army of workers are about to give the results of their study of the problem a scientific demonstration."

When was the last time -- and wasn't it a nice time -- that Boston worried about being "outdone in the matter of civic improvements"? But the article goes on:

"A voluntary association composed of the most prominent citizens of the city have organized the Boston Dwelling House Company. This company has acquired a 30-acre tract in the Forest Hills section, and in the near future will erect, at a cost estimated at a half million dollars, a set of buildings which will give the workers comfortable, sanitary homes."

Woodbourne was a working-class neighborhood, yet it was planned by the elite of the day. It was going to be an Eden: the first example of a new way of life. The landscape was by the Olmsted brothers, successors to the great Frederick Law Olmsted, who created Central Park in New York and Franklin Park in Boston. The planner was Robert Anderson Pope; the architects were Kilham & Hopkins, Grosvenor Atterbury, and Parker, Thomas & Rice -- all top names of the era.

Woodbourne's chief sponsor was a banker named Robert Winsor. Winsor took his task seriously. He sent emissaries to England, Germany, and other parts of Europe to study the housing being built there. He searched for a site that was handy to transportation, and he found it: Streetcars ran, at busy times, every five minutes in each direction on Hyde Park Avenue. The Forest Hills Elevated terminal, just a few blocks away, offered a five-cent, 15-minute ride to downtown. Winsor had the wit to solicit the Elevated Company's shareholders to invest in his project -- "as it will, incidentally, be of benefit to the Company."

The enormous charm of Woodbourne, which strikes everyone who looks at it, lies especially in its courtyards. Here the brick and stucco houses gather into a rough half circle, embracing a green lawn that is a lot like the quad that you'd find on a college campus -- a place for kids to play and grownups to rest or party. Slopes and rocks and old trees were all carefully preserved. The land wasn't leveled, as it would be today in order to make efficient use of heavy motorized equipment.

The architecture is deliberately quaint. It is intended to remind you of Olde England. The planners and architects were frank about that. They wrote: ''It was decided that the effect of the architecture should be akin to the cottage, of which the English have given us so many splendid examples."

For that reason, the brick was laid in a "tapestry" pattern, so it would look old and soft; the stucco was applied with a deliberately rough texture; and the roofs were sloped and covered with slate. Every house had a fireplace, china cupboards with glass doors, and hardwood floors. Electric and phone wires were buried. Care was taken that each house should have at least one view, from its second story, all the way to the horizon. The rooms were oriented to the sun: no northern exposures for bedrooms, for instance.

Remember, this was housing for workers -- "affordable housing," as we say now. But can anyone imagine, today, even the developer of houses for the wealthy country-club set taking such pains? Granted, the rooms at Woodbourne are small, and many of the floor plans are cramped and awkward, but overall, the place is a joy.

Woodbourne is a child of idealism, a child, more specifically, of the English garden-city movement. The garden cities were a reaction against the industrial revolution in Britain and the urban slums it created. The movement, which lasted from the 1890s into the 1920s, created green new towns around London -- Hampstead Garden Suburb, Letchworth Garden City, Welwyn Garden City. The garden-city advocates were trying to make something new in the world: cities or city neighborhoods with the virtues of country life. That's exactly what Woodbourne is.

Like the other Utopias, Woodbourne has long since faded into the pattern of the larger city. Nobody calls it "Woodbourne" anymore, and nobody remembers its beginnings. It's just some nice cottages on some nice streets.

Billerica Garden Suburb

This one is in North Billerica, on the Concord River. About 300 dwellings were built on 57 acres for the employees of the nearby repair shops of the Boston and Maine Railroad. The shops opened in 1914 with 1,200 employees; they expected eventually to employ two or three thousand. Both the repair yards and the housing were the brainchild of a promoter named Charles Williams, a clergyman and former member of the Massachusetts Legislature.

As usual, the papers went ballistic. "Billerica to Have a Garden Suburb That When Complete Will House Nearly a Thousand People," boomed the Lowell Courier-Citizen on July 7, 1914.

Like Woodbourne, Billerica was meant to be more than housing. "This marks the first conclusive stage in bringing into existence in this country the improved methods of housing for workingmen proven so successful in England," stated the prospectus.

What were these methods? One was a copartnership society. Tenants would buy stock in the company that owned their neighborhood. Thus they'd be, in a sense, their own landlords. The sponsors figured that copartnership was better than full home ownership, because it would leave these industrial workers free to move quickly to jobs in other localities if need be. They wouldn't be tied down by having to sell a house. By devices like copartnership, the sponsors also hoped to achieve the "elimination of speculative profits" -- a goal that might sound very strange to a developer of today.

Of course, everything was laid out "along advanced garden suburb lines," which, in practice, meant curving streets, modest densities (five or six families per acre), the economy of building many houses of standard types at one time, and plenty of parkland. You can't fail to perceive the English influence: In Billerica, you can stand at the corner of avenues named Letchworth and Hampstead. There's also a Port Sunlight Road, named for yet another British garden suburb.

In July 1914, the Lowell paper reported that one of the suburb's sponsors was "now on his way to Europe, where he will study similar plans in operation there." One would like to know more about this gentleman's study trip, since World War I broke out only four weeks later. Billerica Garden Suburb in its final form was planned by Arthur Comey, a city planner from Cambridge, and Warren Manning, an eminent landscape architect and former associate of Frederick Law Olmsted. Included was a "free workingmen's train" to bring employees to their jobs.

Today, Billerica Garden Suburb isn't as picturesque as Woodbourne. There's none of the cute, Peter Rabbit-style architecture. But you can still spot several of the original house types, and it's fun to see how they've grown and changed over the decades.

Quincy Point

This one is trickier to find, because it's on four separate plots on both sides of Washington Street in the section of town still called Quincy Point, stretching along Town River Bay. The idea was to make houses for the thousands of workers who had flocked to the Fore River shipyards during the mobilization for World War I. J. E. McLaughlin was the architect.

Near the factories, where things were least pleasant, the sponsors built what they called "temporary" dormitories and a vast common eating hall. Temporary indeed: they've now completely disappeared. The other three neighborhoods held 256 buildings altogether, mostly single and double houses. A semi-detached three-bedroom went for $11,500. Quincy Point opened in 1919.

The biggest section is Baker Yacht Basin, out along the bay, where even today you can buy a small, inexpensive house with a great view across Boston Harbor. But the most interesting neighborhood in Quincy Point is probably the one the sponsors called the Arnold Street tract, and especially the S-curved street called Ruggles.

When you look up Ruggles, which is lined with houses on both sides and ends in a park, you feel the essence of these early planned communities. The houses are of only two or three standard types, and they're built conventionally, of wood frame and clapboard. But there's an indefinable generosity of spirit at work. The houses themselves have been extensively revamped over the years with new dormers, porches, and wings.

And the huge back yards now boast an intriguing variety of home-made structures: garages for cars or tools, sheds for small cottage industries, and what seem to be small dwellings created for the purpose of getting a teen-ager out of the house. You feel a deep sense of American do-it-yourself, make-it-happen know- how at work here. You sense that this is a case where the hand of Big Brother -- the United States Housing Corp., as it happens -- was entirely beneficent. The shipworkers and their successors, grateful for the neighborhood, grabbed hold and made it their own.

Oak Hill Park

This is my other favorite local Utopia, along with Woodbourne. It's something much more modern: veterans' housing, built for the returning GIs of World War II, their brides, and their babies -- the children who would come to be known as baby boomers.

There were 412 houses on 128 acres in a southern corner of Newton near Mount Ida Junior College. There were six standard models, all with three bedrooms, designed and built under a contract with the city by the Kelly Corp., of Arlington. To be eligible to buy, you had to be a veteran and a Newton resident. The vets arranged their own financing through Newton banks at the favorable rates offered through the Federal Housing Authority or the GI Bill. You bought your lot first and then ordered up your house. A typical model without frills cost $8,000; you paid more for cedar siding, a breezeway, a porch, or a garage. It was like ordering extras for a new car. Today's consumer world was being born.

Once more, the sense of social purpose was very strong. This is the only one of the Utopias in which the public sector played a major role -- another sign of changing times. Newton took the lead in creating houses for its own returning soldiers. The city wanted to keep them in Newton, and to do so it needed to create cheaper housing.

As the Newton Villager wrote: "An analysis of the indicated annual income of a majority of the home seekers made it clear that such homes could not be produced if ordinary speculative building practices were followed and further, that such a housing program could be completed successfully only with the full cooperation of the City of Newton."

So the city took charge. It sold bonds and bought 128 acres from the Highland Sand & Gravel Co. It built 5 1/2 miles of streets and named each one after a Newton soldier killed in the war (since there were more soldiers than streets, the names were picked from a container). The city planted 1,600 trees and shrubs. It built a school and planned a shopping center.

Oak Hill Park is what architects call a greenbelt town. The name comes from the era of the New Deal -- a time when, for better or worse, it was believed that government might be better at solving problems than generating them. The original greenbelt towns were model communities created by the federal government in the 1930s, mostly around Washington, D.C. They were yet another spinoff from the garden-city movement. The big goal of the greenbelts was to separate the automobile from the pedestrian, and especially from children. Your front door opened off the street, but your back door opened onto a long, wide, pedestrian "greenway," a middle-of-the-block, car-free park that was supposed to become the neighborhood center. It was all like a green river system: The greenways fed into green parkways that led to the school or the shopping center.

The greenbelt system is what's unique about Oak Hill Park. There's nothing else like it in Massachusetts. And it's still intact. Even in today's privatized world, nobody has chopped the Oak Hill greenways into private, fenced barbecue patios. At its best, it works like this: Short residential streets, branching off larger streets, end in cul-de-sacs. These are lined with houses and used for cars and parking. You enter your house, pass through it, and emerge on the other side onto the shared greenway. So far as a visitor can judge, life still goes on here much as it went on in 1949.

A paragraph from the Newton Villager described that life in a way that conjures up the clubby, self-reliant, and deeply gender-segregated suburban world of the postwar era:

"How can a young matron of twenty-five stay indoors on spring afternoons to finish painting two chests for the bedroom when four of her neighbors have brought their coffee cups outdoors and are sitting on the lawn chatting and watching the children play?"

There was a darker side to Oak Hill Park, as there was to all these Utopias. The FHA approved the development in 1948. That was the year, as it happens, when, for the first time, the US Supreme Court outlawed restrictive race covenants. Until then, and for a long time afterward, the record of the FHA itself was appalling.

Until at least 1948, the agency never insured a housing project of mixed racial occupancy, and it tilted consistently, in its mortgage reviews, against not only blacks but often Jews as well. In 1947, a survey taken in New York state showed that 85 percent of all new developments of 75 or more homes were restricted to whites. So it's virtually certain that Oak Hill Park, in its early days, wasn't the paradise for blacks that it was for whites -- if, indeed, there were any black Newton veterans. Earlier patterns of segregation may have made the whole question moot.

Thus the Boston Utopias, like all Utopias since Plato's, were in some degree the work of control freaks. They were made by people who hoped to perfect life by leaving some of it out. It's not a recipe for the 1990s. And, as we move through the 20th century from Woodbourne to Oak Hill Park, we may shudder a little at the increasing reliance on the automobile, with all its present and future woes. But you can't help admiring the public spirit that built the forgotten Utopias. And, through changing times and populations, they're still pretty good places to live.