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The concept of Utopia can be traced to the early 16th century and was coined by Thomas More as pun on good place/no place in his classic novel, situated in the fictitious Island of Utopia. Since then, utopias have carried the self-contradictory double meaning of being simultaneously desirable and impossible.

Utopias have given way to practical thinking and realism. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared that history has ended.

However, this historical phase was short lived. The environmental crisis, the economic crises, and the recent world political events show that continuing the current way of life is also a utopia. People desire for alternatives; hope for the possibility of an alternative world has grown in Western countries.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw changes in Nature and societies that were hard to imagine possible before the pandemic. The amount of air traffic has decreased radically and Nature has recovered in many of the most polluted corners of the world. However, even these changes were not enough. In order for the planetary boundaries not to be crossed, further and even more fundamental changes are needed at all levels of society.

Are utopias unrealistic wishful thinking or pies in the sky? Many of the things taken for granted, such as the five-day work week or women’s right to vote, have been utopias in their time. Recent proposals for concrete utopias include, for example, basic income, participatory budgeting or the Wikipedia dictionary. According to sociologist Erik Olin Wright, these are examples of concrete steps towards equal societies and genuine democracy. Similarly, the Black Lives Matter movement has brought about significant changes in the public debate in a short time.

Are utopias dangerous? Critics have rightly stated that we don’t need more totalitarian blueprints for ideal societies. Ruth Levitas, a sociologist who studied utopias, redefines utopia. For her, utopias are not about a goal, but about a method which allows exploration of even radical alternatives to current lifestyles and ways of organizing things. A good utopia should be regarded as partial and provisional, as well as open to criticism and debate.

The recognition of the partiality and reflexivity of utopian imagination is also central for dealing with the risks of utopias, for example, the violent imposition of utopias on others. In contrast to the common notion of utopia as a perfect or near-perfect world, we find it more useful to think of utopian projects as the ubiquitous aspects of everyday life from which the research draws. For example, we have to ask, whose utopias are presented in the public debate and whose utopias are strengthened? Whose interests do utopias serve, and from whose point of view are the better worlds presented as improvements?