Critiquing the present, speculating about the future, and engaging in creative thinking to inspire social or environmental change sounds a lot like design. What makes utopian thinking any different?

The concept of utopia has been revisited time and again in literature, philosophy, architecture, and urban planning. Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia—literally, “no place”—describes an imaginary ideal society. Although it is considered a satirical take on the society of his time, it has inspired more “earnest” visions, such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon (1956-74), both of which imagined people largely liberated from labor in pursuit of creativity and leisure. Benign views of automation and various failed utopian experiments have been criticized as naïve at best and tyrannical at worst. Even Plato cautioned that the absolute power given to “philosopher kings” could lead to corruption. Of course, a perfect utopia can only exist in fiction, and a charge of utopianism is often used to dismiss what seems impossible. However, with utopian ideas comes radical speculation about what could and should change in society. Now seems like an opportune time to explore how we might find a place for “no place.” As S.D. Chrowstowka states: Without utopia, our consciousness is not up to what is to be done.

LA+ Journal invites contributions about the relationship between utopia and topics such as design, visual rhetoric, labor, technology, property, and more.

Email abstract and short bio to laplus@design.upenn.edu by 10 June 2025. For information on submissions, see www.laplusjournal.com/Submissions.