The end of the future
Ever since 1516, when Thomas More described an island with a perfect political, social, and legal system in his book Utopia, that word has inspired pages and pages of writing. As of that moment, humanity began to project its desires onto the future. The mythology that explained the past—foundational myths, legends—was channeled toward the future, creating utopia. The most exalted version came with Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, published in the 1950s, which combined the modern myths of utopia with revolution and the arts.10 Utopia was on the horizon. And it served to keep us walking.11
However, when Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history in 1992,12 a claustrophobic present governed by the global economy emerged. According to that author, the collapse of communist governments confirmed liberal democracy as the only possible alternative. The future began to fall short of the expectations of so many utopian centuries. The future lost its inspiring glow. Possible horizons became blurred. The grandiose dreams of modernity unraveled, perhaps precisely because they were overly ambitious. Utopia fizzled out. As Franco “Bifo” Berardi notes in After the Future,13 technology has emerged as a despotic deity that cancels the future, turning time into an unlimited generation of identical fragments.
The Atlas of Utopias is an invigorating breath of fresh air in a world that has lost its great utopia. And it is tangible proof that “real utopias” are underway. We no longer have a Utopia with a capital U, but dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of networked micro utopias.14 Micro utopias where humans come together to weave territories. Concrete micro utopias that activate what Argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa calls “affinity communities.”15 Communities that recreate and reproduce themselves as they go about doing. When the people of San Pedro Magisterio, a neighborhood in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba, organized to build and operate a wastewater treatment plant, they strengthened the community management of the water cycle and the neighborhood itself. The installation of a wastewater treatment plant in the neighborhood was made possible by Fundación Abril, with the support of several organizations.16 The process became a tool for teaching (with sessions in schools), political action, and social unity. Territory-based community water management exceeds the paradigm of what is considered public. The finalists of every edition of the Transformative Cities Award, which feeds the Atlas of Utopias, are utopias situated at the territory level and in communities, and they are anchored in what is the most conducive sphere for putting these micro utopias into practice: the local sphere.
From “asking as we walk” to “learning by doing”
“Asking as we walk” (Caminando preguntamos) was one of the most widely known catchphrases of the Neo-Zapatista movement that erupted in southern Mexico in the 1990s. “Asking as we walk” opens the game up to others, inviting them to join the struggle. Dialogue is a process, not a substance: an unfolding, not a synthesis. The Zapatista movement does not talk, it listens. It does not respond, it asks. It recognizes particularities and proposes a place for all of them. It strives for a polyphonic dialogue built from many dialogues.17 In the Zapatista listening process, a common fabric emerges, a plurality of voices, a subject that is very different from the Western exclusive ‘we’. From the communities of affinity, from the communities of territorial practices, emanates an open and inclusive subject, in which every person teaches and learns. Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui18 takes up the Aymara word jiwasa, a fourth person pronoun that acts as an inclusive ‘we’. The pronoun jiwasa differs from the pronoun nayanaka, which is the exclusive ‘we’. When someone hears jiwasa they hear an invitation to join in, to belong. The San Pedro Magisterio cooperative would not have been possible without the jiwasa, or without the ayni, the practice of community reciprocity.