Anticapitalist Utopias and Neotopias

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Mulgan
Keyword(s):  
William Morris ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Utopian Thinking

This chapter studies the radical alternatives that can be found in the traditions of utopian thinking that have offered fully formed alternatives to a flawed present, from Thomas More to Ursula LeGuin, and from William Morris to Ivan Efremov. Utopias are one of the ways societies imagine alternative futures, and many utopians put their ideas into practice too, creating islands of the future. Then as now they were healthy antidotes to the lazy pessimism which claims that all attempts at progress are futile. If utopias are worlds where predators have been eliminated, dystopias are ones where they rule. But utopias both promise too much and deliver too little, their greatest weakness now as in the past being that they lack an account of how change will happen.

scholarly journals Making Space for Past Futures: Rural Landscape Temporalities in Roman Britain

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-342
Author(s):  
Andrew Gardner ◽  
Lacey Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Rural Landscape ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
The Future ◽  
Material Record

In this paper, we seek to explore the ways in which landscapes become venues not only for manipulations of the past in a present, but also for shaping possible futures. Considerations of temporality and being in the landscape have been more strongly focused on the past and social memory than the future, anticipation and projectivity, but these are vital considerations if we are to preserve the possibility that past people imagined alternative futures. A fruitful archaeological context for an exploration of past futures can be found in the choices people made during the late Iron Age and Roman period in Britain, which has an increasingly rich and high-resolution material record for complex changes and continuities during a period of cultural interactions and imperial power dynamics. More specifically, recent research into the architectural and material practices evident on rural settlement sites and across landscapes forces us to challenge preconceptions about the reactive/reactionary culture of rural societies. Case-studies from Kent and the West Country will be deployed to develop the argument that in the materializing of time, the future has a very significant part to play.

Dreaming through the Ages: Towards a Global History of Utopian and Dystopian Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Christos Efstathiou
Keyword(s):  
Working Conditions ◽  
Social System ◽  
Aldous Huxley ◽  
Global History ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Utopian Thought

For the five hundred years since Thomas More first depicted the island of Utopia, the portrayal of an ideal social system has intrigued generations of authors. The concept served a double purpose: it applied to an ideal place (eutopia) but also an imaginary, unrealizable one (utopia). Although the search for utopia started from the Classical Age, More invented the genre and hundreds of utopian thinkers followed in his footsteps trying to predict how life would unfold and provide a detailed description of an ideal (or nonideal) future society. From H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley to Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula Le Guin, successful and popular authors showed a deep concern for future living and working conditions. If the past is another country, the growing literature of utopian thought suggests that the future can be a whole continent. Several undiscovered countries lay in waiting and intellectual historians have often been fascinated by the dense explorations of the utopian writers.

YUGONOSTALGIA: RESTORATIVE AND REFLECTIVE NOSTALGIA IN FORMER YUGOSLAVIA

2005 ◽  
Vol 32 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 227-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Lindstrom
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Fixed Time ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Multi Media

Drawing on Svetlana Boym's distinction between "restorative" and "reflective" nostalgia, the essay maps two broad, and often overlapping, ideal types of Yugonostalgia expressed in and through contemporary former Yugoslav film, popular music, and multi-media. The first expresses reeonstructive longing for an essential Yugoslav past; the second offers self-consciously ambivalent and critical frames in indulging fantasies of this past. What different forms of Yugonostalgia share in common is challenging symbolic geographies of disunity that have dominated political discourse in former Yugoslavia for the last two decades. The two types can be differenciated by their stance toward the presentpast and the future: while both of them are based on fantasies of the past, thc "restorative" Yugonostalgic looks backward towards a seemingly fixed time and space while "reflective" nostalgic restlessly grapples with the dislocation so palpable in the former Yugoslavia to imagine alternative futures.

Editing Thomas More : The Past and the Future

Moreana ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 15 (Number 58) (2) ◽  
pp. 5-12
Author(s):  
Richard S. Sylvester
Keyword(s):  
Thomas More ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

A Future in Ruins

KronoScope ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-211
Author(s):  
Jilt Jorritsma
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Sustainable Futures ◽  
Present World

Abstract Around the world, the rise of temperatures due to global warming is revealing and exposing forgotten traces of the past that are still scored somewhere in the physical terrain. This paper suggests that the transformative landscapes of the Anthropocene not only confront our present world with a ruined and unprecedented future; they also draw our attention to suppressed and stowed-away memories and geographies from the past. By examining imaginaries of sustainable futures in Mexico City, New York and Amsterdam, it will be shown that site-specific ruins and traces of past realities have an evocative potential: they are used to imagine alternative historical trajectories and indicate possible alternative futures that challenge the absoluteness of our present world. The underlying temporality in these imaginaries is one in which the future is portended as a return of a past: there lies a future in these ruins.

Historians of the Future

Worldview ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 24 (9) ◽  
pp. 5-7
Author(s):  
David Paul Rebovich
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

Science fiction, the literature about the future, is a genre of considerable age and distinguished lineage—or so say its practitioners and afficionados, who have inducted Plato, Thomas More, Campanella, and Poe posthumously into their ranks. This can be seen as a charming historical corrective, but it is more: an invocation of great minds of the past to draw attention to serious discussion of the future and make it worthy of our consideration.

Total heritage: future Eopolis for cultural urban singularity

foresight ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kastytis Rudokas ◽  
Indre Grazuleviciute-Vileniske
Keyword(s):  
Design Methodology ◽  
Complex Problem ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Complex Problem Solving ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Past ◽  
Horizon Scanning ◽  
The Future ◽  
Determinant Structure

Purpose The purpose of the article is to develop the concept of forecasting futures using the past by integrating the concept of heritage in it. Design/methodology/approach This paper demonstrates the process of development of the total heritage approach and its application. The process consists of the following steps: the review of the selected urban life visions and models of the past from prehistoric Catalhoyuk settlement up to the 20th century Japanese Metabolism to trace the examples of complex problem-solving and singularity presence that can be used for horizon scanning for the futures of urbanism; the development of total heritage approach based on the further analysis of selected examples demonstrating even unintentional presence of heritage in the construction of the futures; application of the total heritage approach for the modeling the futures of urbanism and illustrating it with the scenario of the future eopolis as the premise for cultural urban singularity. Findings This paper demonstrates the process of development of the total heritage approach and its application. The process consists of the following steps: the review of selected historic urban utopias to trace the principal scheme, how the future or ideal visions of urbanism were constructed; the development of total heritage approach based on the further analysis of Thomas More Utopia and Neolithic Catalhoyuk settlement demonstrating even unintentional presence of heritage in the construction of the futures; application of the total heritage approach for the modeling the futures of urbanism and illustrating it with the scenario of the future eopolis as the premise for cultural urban singularity. Originality/value The total heritage approach, developed in this research, presents heritage as the determinant structure or ethical imperative for sustainable future development toward cultural urban singularity.

YUGONOSTALGIA: RESTORATIVE AND REFLECTIVE NOSTALGIA IN FORMER YUGOSLAVIA

2005 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 227-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICOLE LINDSTROM
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Fixed Time ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Multi Media

Abstract: Drawing on Svetlana Boym's distinction between "restorative" and "reflective" nostalgia, the essay maps two broad, and often overlapping, ideal types of Yugonostalgia expressed in and through contemporary former Yugoslav film, popular music, and multi-media. The first expresses reconstructive longing for an essential Yugoslav past; the second offers self-consciously ambivalent and critical frames in indulging fantasies of this past. What different forms of Yugonostalgia share in common is challenging symbolic geographies of disunity that have dominated political discourse in former Yugoslavia for the last two decades. The two types can be differentiated by their stance toward the presentpast and the future: while both of them are based on fantasies of the past, the "restorative" Yugonostalgic looks backward towards a seemingly fixed time and space while "reflective" nostalgic restlessly grapples with the dislocation so palpable in the former Yugoslavia to imagine alternative futures.

scholarly journals Future-making in Burkina Faso: ordering and materializing temporal relations in the Bagré Growth Pole Project

2021 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-175
Author(s):  
Janine Hauer
Keyword(s):  
Burkina Faso ◽  
Temporal Relations ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Growth Pole ◽  
The Past ◽  
Path Dependencies ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Made In

Abstract. Visions for the future drive current practices and shape daily lives. Recently, the future has also become a ubiquitous theme in the social sciences. Starting from the observation that the future serves as an explanation and legitimization for the doings and sayings of different groups of actors involved in the Bagré Growth Pole Project in Burkina Faso, this paper offers an analysis of two instantiations of future-making. Based on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Burkina Faso, I examine how the future is addressed and made by ordering and materializing temporal relations. In the first part, I focus on how the past–present–future triad is constantly cut, the past blanked and the future prioritized. I argue that this imperative of the future serves to silence contestations and conflicts from which possibly alternative futures could be derived. In the second part, I turn to the material dimension of future-making through infrastructure construction and maintenance. Infrastructuring in Bagré permanently alters landscapes and creates “as-if” spaces, thereby producing path dependencies that will channel future possibilities of living in the area. Shedding light on how specific futures are (un)made in practice provides a lens which may inform discussions about alternative and eventually more just futures.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document