Utopia Archives - Public Seminar

The Sword Is Mightier Than the Pen

An interview with Margaret Atwood

October 2, 2024 • by Margaret Atwood and Aaron James Wendland

This interview was conducted as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic ...

Philosophy

How Science Fiction Can Address the Crisis of Political Imagination

Making a case for revising the future

February 22, 2022 • by Lina Nasr El Hag Ali

Imagining alternative futures could help breach some of today’s most pressing political and philosophical concerns: for example, the Anthropocene and environmental catastrophe, renewed calls for decolonization against the rise of fascism(s) around the world, our complicity with imperialist violence abroad and political impotence at home. ...

How Science Fiction Can Address the Crisis of Political Imagination

Feature

The Invention of “Gritty” New York

Where did nostalgia for gritty New York come from and what makes it so potent?

August 2, 2018 • by Zed Adams

Nostalgia for “gritty” New York is so strong, it’s surprising that someone hasn’t started selling cans of “authentic NYC grit” in Times Square. Evidence of this nostalgia is everywhere, from Jeremiah Moss’s Vanishing New York to David Simon’s The Deuce. But where did this nostalgia come from, and what makes ...

Feature

Utopoly

A utopian design game

December 18, 2017 • by Neil Farnan

Since Hayek’s Road to Serfdom managed to conflate planning with totalitarianism, the use of design in utopian discourse can cause concern in some quarters, suggesting a master-plan or blueprint model. However, Hayek’s concern was with the failure of planning rather than its success. The irony was that a key component of capitalist ...

Feature

How Utopia Became a Real Estate Leaflet?

Discursive formation of branded housing projects in Turkey

December 14, 2017 • by Bilge Serin

When it comes to gated communities, recurrences of similar everyday life images and spatial representations in mass media form a discourse of the future everyday life. It depicts an ideal living environment that aligns neoliberalization with an idealization of private urban services, commodified forms of housing production, enclave living and ...

Feature

Concrete Utopia

(Re)producing life in, against and beyond the open veins of capital

December 7, 2017 • by Ana Cecilia Dinerstein

Concrete utopia is a contradictory process that develops within, against and beyond the social relation of capital and its institutions. Concrete utopia is subsumed into the open veins of capital and is crisscrossed by the main contradiction of capitalist work: we live in a society where we need to work in ...

Feature

A Utopia for Money

A visit to the secretive art warehouse at the Singapore airport

April 27, 2017 • by Max Haiven

I have visited money’s utopia: it is not only a utopia for those with money, but a utopia for money itself. Sequestered in the winding roads of an industrial park, next to the airport tarmac of one of Asia’s busiest airports, a mere block away from the garrison of the border ...

Multi Media

Reclaiming Utopia

Challenging the Financial Imagination

January 16, 2017 • by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

The panel invited provocative reflections from theorists, activists and artists, on the possibilities of reclaiming radical utopias as a response to an increasingly dominant ‘financial imagination’. Set in London, a hub of such financial imagination (imbued with liberal utopian notions of ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’), the panel addressed questions such as: ...

Education

“Reclaiming Utopia”

An Introduction to the Project of Challenging the Financial Imagination

January 3, 2017 • by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

Dithering between the naiveté of techno-utopias of a fully-automated post capitalism, and the banal indulgence in bureaucratic ‘utopias of rules’, utopian thinking today seems to offer meagre hope for articulating and enacting radical futures. Meanwhile, in the world of financial markets, a formidable imagined future is being methodically produced. Fictional ...

Education

Utopias of the Surface

December 22, 2016 • by Will Scarlett

Nothing is really visible, not even in the noon sun’s blinding reflection on the shimmering sea. A magical time, when gods appear. -Claudio Magris, A Different Sea Almost every day, I walk a few blocks west from my apartment to the Hudson River. This is one of the few places where the ...

Education

Utopian Niche-ings and the Politics of If and Otherwise

November 8, 2016 • by Abou Farman

Despite the radical role of utopian thinking in early revolutionary and social change movements in Europe, by the latter half of the 20th century utopian projects had been largely discredited as idealistic and unrealizable or as preludes to an inevitable dystopia. But there has been a revival of utopia talk ...

Utopian Niche-ings and the Politics of If and Otherwise

Uncategorized

Utopian Realism

October 28, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

I once asked Jean Baudrillard for his impressions of his tour of the colleges of America. “Boring,” he said, “like any realized utopia.” This was a provocation on several levels. In the cold war, realized utopia mean Soviet terror, not American prosperity. And of course Baudrillard was as aware as Jameson ...