Utopia is generally thought about as that place on Earth -- usually imagined -- where human society is resplendent with all things good and harmonious and the people who live there are free and happy. Utopian cities have appeared in fables, in stories, on film, and in manifestos. Perhaps, also, Utopian cities have existed in the real world, if only for a short time, or at a small-scale.  

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Sometimes the word Utopia is bandied about pejoratively to refer to a world of impossible idealism and fantasy. Utopia, under such a framework of thought, is the term we use to describe a place where we might all desire to live but which is ultimately unattainable. Equally, though, the word is used in a serious and earnest manner under the belief that through radical change or through gradual evolution, the world can develop into an ideal, even idyllic, place. This project, Ecotopia 2121, might be seen as sympathetic to the latter way of thinking.

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Utopia is sometimes theorized upon on a single lone feature in society. For example, the abolition of all human suffering or the achievement of full equality but it is just as likely to be posited in a multidimensional manner involving many features. Some commonly expressed themes in utopian writing include the following:

               

-- social harmony, equality, and justice meld symbiotically with personal freedom

-- peace and love overcome hatred and violence

-- material welfare is achieved for all without recourse to greed or exploitation

-- ethnic and spiritual diversity is tolerated and racial harmony is valued  

-- work, if it exists, is almost always enjoyable and human life is almost always satisfying.

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All these qualities shine through in very diverse ways via the scenarios of the Ecotopia 2121 project.

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When Thomas More first thrust Utopia upon the world in 1516/17, he was being intentionally ambiguous as he invented the word. Although Thomas More was English, like all good European scholars of his century, his classical language skills were superb. The word Utopia is thus derived from the Greek-language, in actuality, but in the process of bringing it from Greek into an English form, it could refer to either a good land or a nowhere land (or, indeed, both).

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To design a Utopian society often means to be at once imaginative and optimistic but also somewhat critical and subversive. Thomas More patterned this enduring combination when he painted his optimistic account of an idealistic Christian Utopia within which was embedded a subtle and subversive critique of King Henry VIII’s England. In the end, Henry VIII had More’s head chopped-off and set on a spike over London Bridge. This wasn’t for writing the book, specifically, but for siding with the Roman Catholic Church against Henry VIII on one too many matters. For his commitment to Roman Catholicism, Thomas More was declared a Saint by Pope Pious XI.

 

Strangely, perhaps, Thomas More was also honored centuries later by the Soviet Union for his communistic ideals about the common ownership of property. During Soviet Russia, the name of Thomas More was in ninth position from the top of Moscow’s Obelisk of Revolutionary Thinkers.

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Subsequent to Thomas More’s 500 year old book, whenever Utopian thinkers have set out to design or discover the best possible socially-ideal place, they often set out to attack certain aspects of their own present day society -- cloaking their visions in both hope and satire. I dare say this may be the same impulse that sometimes flows through the 100 Utopian scenarios explored in the Ecotopia 2121 project

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For a detailed investigation into many of the 100 cities of Ecotopia 2121, visit the Case Studies page

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