Hope and Desire: Slow Reading Ecotopia 2121

Read this, as an antidote to despair!

To show he loves me, my spouse thoughtfully buys me books and on special occasions he brings me utopias. Ecotopia 2121: A Vision for Our Future Green Utopia — in 100 Cities was one such gift. And what a gift!

This is a phenomenal and beautifully-illustrated book which simply must be purchased in hardcover. See the gorgeous website ecotopia2121.com for a taste.

After browsing the book for awhile, I finally decided to undertake a thorough exploration of it as a slow reading project — reading just one or two utopias a day.

This was a wonderful way to simmer with the ideas and enjoy the illustrations. It was a fun and inspiring read.

In this book, Dr. Alan Marshall looks at 100 cities and their most pressing problems. From this, he extrapolates their future and imagines a positive outcome for their citizens through an ecotopian lens (positive futures reached through sustainability and renewable energy).

There are some wonderful and possible ideas here for improving urban life, the implementation of which typically depend upon the political will and involvement of an outspoken populace.

These days, I am leery of getting overly excited by outside influences and cautious about the perspectives I am reading. Lately, I've been trimming my to-read list instead of adding to it.

However, what this book does wonderfully is encourage questions and participation. It avoids a single solution or polemic approach. Instead, it engages in problems with creativity and explores various possibilities.

In addition, Marshall has thoroughly researched each city. The book contains an extensive bibliography.

While some of the imagined cities verge on dystopias (cities with serious disadvantages or perhaps undesirable aspects),  Marshall always aims to solve a problem and lean towards utopia — a positive implementation and outcome of an idea.

I found the richly-imagined, beautifully-depicted future cities and the possibilities presented to be wellsprings of hope.

"Hope and desire, mixed with a rich social imagination, can work together as potent antidotes to the complacency of accepting the status quo." 

This would make a fantastic classroom text, perhaps along with Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, for a variety of studies and students — urban planning, geography, environmental and sustainability studies, creative writing students etc.

Some favorite ideas:

• "All of the buildings are veneered with a skin laden with algae that not only capture solar energy but also feed on carbon dioxide and fix it into the building walls..." — Vienna 2121 * Agents of the Green Economy
• "hotels transformed into public schools" — Varna 2121 * Chronicle of the Sea Garden
• Participatory budgeting, eco-drones! — Toronto 2121 * Eco-taxes, Eco-budgets
• "every individual in business...attends annual environmental education classes before being granted a license to work" and "good food is more important than excessive mobility" — Sydney 2121 * Blue Environmentalism
• Piezoelectric tubeways! — Shanghai 2121 * Gay City of the East
• "It was not technology that changed the world but enthusiastic storytelling!"
— New York 2121 * Revolutionary New Learning
• "Precautionary Principle: if there is any risk to human or environmental health from a new machine system...then err on the side of caution..."— Plymouth 2121 * City of the Neo-Luddites
• Robust democracy!

Two favorite cities:

• "All they can do is survive within, then beautify and savor, their own small part of the world." — San Francisco 2121 * The City of Growhemia
• "...an evolving ecotopian city will offer citizens a chance to pursue other forms of freedom beyond the superficial freedom of mobility that a car offers. A utopian city....acts to encourage each and every person to learn to adapt to the new or the evolving utopian form. Citizens can thus teach themselves...to be happy—even happier—without cars." — Oxford 2121 * Tranquil Streets of a Retro-future City