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Utopian Dreams offers one writer's attempt to retreat from the 'real world' - which is making him emptier and angrier by the day - and seek out the alternatives to modern manners and morality. Instead of cynicism, loneliness and depression, is it possible to be idealistic, to find belonging and companionship with others who share your sadness, or even, perhaps, your happiness? With his wife and baby in tow, Jones spends a year with spritualists, time-travellers, reformed drug addicts and Quakers, producing a fascinating exploration of the meaning of community.
Utopia City.Rebuilt from the ashes of America's most horrific terror attack and transformed into a paragon of technological advancement, this city stands as a beacon of possibility where almost anything can happen.Jericho Hansen certainly hopes so; as a gay superhero in the deep South, his ambition is to achieve lifelong recognition by joining Force Majeure, America's best-known superhero team. But to do that, he must first travel to Utopia and learn the hard way if he's got what it takes. The events that transpire when he gets there will turn his entire world upside down. He will experience love and loss, triumph and tragedy. Mysteries will be solved and fresh inquiries opened.Welcome to Utopia, where the most important lesson is that nothing is truly as it seems.
Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares by Miguel López-Lozano Pdf
Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares traces the history of utopian representations of the Americas, first on the part of the colonizers, who idealized the New World as an earthly paradise, and later by Latin American modernizing elites, who imagined Western industrialization, cosmopolitanism and consumption as a utopian dream for their independent societies. Carlos Fuentes, Homero Aridjis, Carmen Boullosa, and Alejandro Morales utilize the literary genre of dystopian science fiction to elaborate on how globalization has resulted in the alienation of indigenous peoples and the deterioration of the ecology. This book concludes that Mexican and Chicano perspectives on the past and the future of their societies constitute a key site for the analysis of the problems of underdevelopment, social injustice, and ecological decay that plague today's world. Whereas utopian discourse was once used to justify colonization, Mexican and Chicano writers now deploy dystopian rhetoric to interrogate projects of modernization, contributing to the current debate on the global expansion of capitalism. The narratives coincide in expressing confidence in the ability of Latin American and U.S. Latino popular sectors to claim a decisive role in the implementation of enhanced measures to guarantee an ecologically sound, ethnically diverse, and just society for the future of the Americas.
In Utopian Dreams, a young research scientist works on an I.Q. enhancing drug and tries it on himself. He ends up destroying the human race and beginning again hundreds of years later as he clones his aging, almost dead, cyborg body. Other stories in this book include subjects of romance, mystery, adventure, science fiction and fantasy. Written with a wide audience in mind, the author John Hoel, is at his best writing short stories. He resides in a log cabin by a pond nestled in the Ocooch Mountains of southwestern Wisconsin and writes every day.
Everyday Hopes, Utopian Dreams by Don Hanlon Johnson Pdf
Finding his idealism challenged by the reactionary forces that have proliferated in the post-9/11 world, Don Hanlon Johnson felt a need to recover more sober visions of hope amid the many reasons for despair and cynicism. "Everyday Hopes, Utopian Dreams" is a bracing backward turn toward the diverse and often conflicting visions passed down to Johnson by his immigrant ancestors who settled in the Sacramento Valley in the nineteenth century. Through stories about neighborhood, local churches, hunting and fishing, driving, cooking, heavy construction, and schools, he examines what in our forebears' ideals continue to nurture us and what aspects of those ideals carry germs of personal and social harm. Johnson's descriptions offer a lens for recovering the deep soul of America-one that deserves attention as a model for progressives and anyone concerned the directions our country has taken in response to 9/11.
Intellectuals, Utopian Dreams, and the Question of Human Rights in China by Mab Huang Pdf
This book brings together 13 papers published by the author over the past 50 years, arranged chronologically, so the reader can follow the unfolding development of the author’s thinking on the issues discussed here. The essays primarily investigate the role intellectuals in the dramatic changes in China since the fall of the old imperial order, with an emphasis on the tension between the urge towards utopian dreams and the quest for human rights and democracy. The earlier pieces are two chapters from the author’s 1969 Columbia University PhD dissertation dealing with the Chinese Communist Party leadership methods and the conflict between the Party and the peasants during the time of the People’s Commune Movement. Several other essays on the question of human rights date from the 1980s and 1990s. The last two essays go beyond China to take up the debate on Asian values and the concept of peace in Asia. Given the unique perspective which differs from that of the ruling party and government in China, as well as the usual political realist perspective of the Western press, this book will contribute to a better understanding of the complex and entangled role of the intellectuals and the political process on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. It will be helpful to both the academic community and the well-educated general public.
An essential guide to the strange, sometimes sinister culture of contemporary Italy. In 1999 Tobias Jones travelled to Italy, expecting to discover the pastoral bliss described by centuries of foreign visitors and famous writers. Instead, he discovered a very different country, besieged by unfathomable terrorism and deep-seated paranoia, where crime is scarcely ever met with punishment. Now, in this fascinating travelogue, Jones explores not just Italy's familiar delights (art, climate, cuisine), but the livelier and stranger sides of the bel paese: language, football, Catholicism, cinema, television and terrorism. Why, he wonders, do bombs still explode every time politics start getting serious? Why does everyone urge him to go home as soon as possible, saying that Italy is a 'brothel'? And why do people warn him that 'Clean Hands' only disguise 'Dirty Feet'?
In the wake of the monstrous projects of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others in the twentieth century, the idea of utopia has been discredited. Yet, historian Jay Winter suggests, alongside the “major utopians” who murdered millions in their attempts to transform the world were disparate groups of people trying in their own separate ways to imagine a radically better world. This original book focuses on some of the twentieth-century’s “minor utopias” whose stories, overshadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag, suggest that the future need not be as catastrophic as the past. The book is organized around six key moments when utopian ideas and projects flourished in Europe: 1900 (the Paris World's Fair), 1919 (the Paris Peace Conference), 1937 (the Paris exhibition celebrating science and light), 1948 (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), 1968 (moral indictments and student revolt), and 1992 (the emergence of visions of global citizenship). Winter considers the dreamers and the nature of their dreams as well as their connections to one another and to the history of utopian thought. By restoring minor utopias to their rightful place in the recent past, Winter fills an important gap in the history of social thought and action in the twentieth century.
The revolutionary ideals of equality, communal living, proletarian morality, and technology worship, rooted in Russian utopianism, generated a range of social experiments which found expression, in the first decade of the Russian revolution, in festival, symbol, science fiction, city planning, and the arts. In this study, historian Richard Stites offers a vivid portrayal of revolutionary life and the cultural factors--myth, ritual, cult, and symbol--that sustained it, and describes the principal forms of utopian thinking and experimental impulse. Analyzing the inevitable clash between the authoritarian elements in the Bolshevik's vision and the libertarian behavior and aspirations of large segments of the population, Stites interprets the pathos of utopian fantasy as the key to the emotional force of the Bolshevik revolution which gave way in the early 1930s to bureaucratic state centralism and a theology of Stalinism.
WINNER OF THE 2022 WRITERS' TRUST BALSILLIE PRIZE FOR PUBLIC POLICY WINNER OF FOR THE PATTIS FAMILY FOUNDATION GLOBAL CITIES BOOK AWARD Is the ‘smart city’ the utopia we’ve been waiting for? The promise of the so-called smart city has been at the forefront of urban planning and development since the early 2010s, and the tech industry that supplies smart city software and hardware is now worth hundreds of billions a year. But the ideas and approaches underpinning smart city tech raise tough and important questions about the future of urban communities, surveillance, automation, and public participation. The smart city era, moreover, belongs firmly in a longer historical narrative about cities — one defined by utopian ideologies, architectural visions, and technological fantasies. Smart streetlights, water and air quality tracking, autonomous vehicles: with examples from all over the world, including New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Portland, and Chicago, Dream States unpacks the world of smart city tech, but also situates this important shift in city-building into a broader story about why we still dream about perfect places. "John Lorinc’s incisive analysis in Dream States reminds us that the search for urban utopia is not new. Throughout the book, Lorinc underscores the fact that a gamut of urban innovations – from smart city megaprojects to e-government to pandemic preparedness tools – only provide promise when scrutinized together with the political, economic, social, and physical complexities of urban life." – Shauna Brail, University of Toronto "Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias takes us on a fascinating journey across world cities to show how technology has shaped them in the past and how smart city technology will reshape them in the future. This book is essential reading for policy makers, researchers, and practitioners interested in understanding the opportunities and challenges of smart city technology and what it means for city building." – Enid Slack, University of Toronto School of Cities "“Utopia may be the oldest grift in the city-building business, but Dream States shows that technology is a timeless tool for turning the most ordinary of urban dreams – clean air and water, safe streets, and decent homes – into reality. As digital dilettantes try to sell us on a software overhaul, John Lorinc provides us an indispensable and flawless guide to the must-haves and never-agains of the smart city.” – Anthony Townsend, Urbanist in Residence, Cornell Tech, author of Smart Cities
D'Antonio pens the first full biography of one of the most successful and unusual business titans of the 20th century--Milton Hershey--and a startling history of how his commanding fortune shaped a unique utopian legacy.
A Fire of Straw in Bureau County: The Forgotten Utopian Dream of Lamoille's Rosemont Domain by Robert J. Glaser Pdf
The prairie of Bureau Co., Illinois in the 1840s could hardly be thought of as the location for a planned utopian settlement. This is especially true if the motivation for the effort was the complex and controversial writings of a French utopian socialist who never stepped foot on American soil, much less the prairies of northern Illinois. The elaborate doctrines of Charles Fournier would be imported and stimulate thousands of Americans to action - specifically some idealists residing in Bureau Co., Illinois. The Lamoille [sic] Agricultural and Mechanical Association would have been the first such attempt in Bureau County and the State of Illinois and is a long-overlooked aspect of local and regional history. As the United States was facing critical decisions regarding its socio-economic development, the Fourierist movement offered a significant alternative to the eventual adoption of our current system of industrial-capitalism. In their own way, La Moille and Bureau County were part of that great debate.
Differences in the City: Postmetropolitan Heterotopias As Liberal Utopian Dreams by Jorge León Casero,Julia Urabayen Pdf
Although it is one of the most vague and ambiguous concepts proposed by Foucault, the term "heterotopia" has been, and continues to be, one of the most widely used in technical as well as in human and social disciplines. Coinciding with the rise of postmodernism and the supposed crisis of the great unitary stories of the West, the great heterogeneity of urban and spatial phenomena and typologies referred to in the Foucauldian notion was further expanded, with the explicit intention of using it as part of the new urban ideology that neoliberal theorists of architecture and urbanism were beginning to implement under the leitmotif of the city by fragments. In this way, neoliberal urban ideology appropriated the concept of heterotopia, making it pass for libertarian and endowing it with the ability to exert political resistance to economic and urban planning by public administrations.This is why the concept of heterotopia has been used simultaneously and repeatedly as a tool to praise the beatitudes of neoliberal urbanism as well as to defend its emancipatory character by social movements and activists In this sense, the emancipatory potential that heterotopias could have had in the disciplinary arrangement of space has ended up transforming into a magic formula with which to transform the impositions of the neoliberal (de)arrangement of the territory into a hymn to freedom of movement, to a socio-cultural diversity without class conflict.The aim of this collective and interdisciplinary reflection is to prove that heterotopias are spaces that cannot be considered a priori as directly emancipatory but apart from an effective political project. As we live in a postmetropolitan word, we should ask: Are these post-metropolitan heterotopias capable of shaping themselves as the new nerve centers of anti-capitalist resistance or are they only capable of subverting the disciplinary power of public administrations already brought to crisis-point decades ago by neoliberal capitalism? Can they function as the spatial tools of an antagonistic politics for the common or, on the contrary, is their operation intrinsically neoliberal?This book brings together various analyses and investigations that maintain conflicting positions on the emancipatory or ideological-alienating character of heterotopias with the dual objective of avoiding their Western-centric bias and preserving any possible trait of emancipatory potential that may be rearticulated from an epistemological diversity viewpoint. With these objectives in mind, we have organized the twenty-two articles that make up this book into five major thematic sections, coinciding with some of the main topics around which socio-spatial debates dedicated to heterotopias have taken place in the last twenty-five years: the postmetropolis, public space, the right to the city, gender relations and their symbolic condition. Although these five categories should not be understood as unrelated compartments --but quite the opposite-- we have chosen to use this classification as an analytical tool to illuminate some of the focal points around which to exercise effective critique of one of the most frustratingly incomplete, inconsistent [and] incoherent concepts of socio-spatial theory.
An exploration of radical megaprojects in the Ecuadorian Amazon, considering the fate of utopian fantasies under conditions of global capitalism From 2007 to 2017, the “Citizens’ Revolution” launched an ambitious series of post-neoliberal megaprojects in the remote Amazonian region of Ecuador, including an interoceanic transport corridor, a world-leading biotechnology university, and a planned network of two hundred “Millennium Cities.” The aim was to liberate the nation from its ecologically catastrophic dependence on Amazonian oil reserves, while transforming its jungle region from a wild neoliberal frontier into a brave new world of “twenty-first-century socialism.” This book documents the heroic scale of this endeavor, the surreal extent of its failure, and the paradoxical process through which it ended up reinforcing the economic model that it had been designed to overcome. It explores the phantasmatic and absurd dimensions of the transformation of social reality under conditions of global capitalism, deconstructing the utopian fantasies of the state, and drawing attention to the eruption of insurgent utopias staged by those with nothing left to lose.
Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia by Leon Surette Pdf
While these authors' political inclinations are well known and much discussed, previous studies have failed to adequately analyse the surrounding political circumstances that informed the specific utopian aspirations in each writer's works. Balancing a thorough knowledge of their works with an understanding of the political climate of the early twentieth century, Leon Surette provides new insights into the motivations and development of each writer's respective political postures. Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia examines their political commentary and their correspondence with each other from 1910s to the 1950s. Contextualizing their political thought in a world troubled by two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Bolshevik Revolution, Surette traces their shared concerns and the divergent responses of each of these figures in the historical moment to the risk they perceived of democracies becoming the pawns of commercial and industrial elites, leading to war and mindless consumerism. They all leaned toward autocratic solutions, though Pound and Lewis eventually admitted their error.