Utopias — visions of a better future — are incredible tools for informing and inspiring social change. Their reputation, however, is extremely poor, at a time when we need such a radical restructuring of society that everyday life will soon become unrecognisable — or collapse entirely. This is a deeply dangerous time to lose our ability to imagine a better world. We desperately need new visions for life and society in order to halt “business as usual”, and actually attempt to navigate the climate and ecological emergency (as well as overcome pervasive inequality, alienation and meaninglessness). To explore how we might reclaim utopia, let’s trace its downfall under modernism and postmodernism, before synthesising the two under the emerging “metamodern” paradigm…
