In this age of zombie formalism with a splash dash of logo-fied ideologies, browsing chips at a 30 pump gasoline oasis off interstate 1000, there exists a paradox in the chaos of being. In this cultural thermodynamics of demise fed through the extraction of nature by not-nature, the erratic city clings to complexity and longtail intellectual economies, offering distraction and delay. This blossoming and ballooning of culture, the equivalent of the human gut biome, comes at the expense of the depletion of the wild and untamed. Yet the alternative is more frightening, and that is the conformity and unanimity of reductive utopian ideals, perpetuated by structures of power be it localized charisma or state-sanctioned.

These proposals for new harmonies [for the dust of the past, the failing of those present, and the allure of the but-wait promises for the future] are nothing more than vaudevillian tricks used toward slinging their particular brand of collective self-help. Oh, she dreams of a unified infrastructure, gleaming and glorious, binding us in a blissful ideology. The promotion of an individual utopia is socio-political spamming of the highest order, a false promise of harmonious land use, a tactic of social engineering with promises of regeneration, cohabitation and TedTalkian futurism. 

These layers of illusion perpetuate false assumptions that the hegemonic ordering of space can be subverted by negating its malevolent design. Messages are embedded in the built environment that coerce social behavior as a means of ensuring collaborative consumption. A new place has not been created. Rather, it has only presented the illusion of spatial intervention through its aestheticized abstraction. One current iteration of this utopian practice, albeit small and gestural, is the exercise of creative placemaking. These ornamentations (often gaudily expressive in their use of color and mass-produced furniture) and supersized table games project an allure of creativity, experimentation, and innovation. Yet these embraced and elevated values are often nothing more than the code words for the creation of new and more efficient markets for the consumption of goods. 

Creative placemaking, public and social practice art, and tactical urbanism are mere prosthetics. When applied against the material realities of global capitalism, they produce ineffectual outcomes, or at best turbulence. Whether they are objects of affection, symbols of privilege, heritage, objectification of a generalized civic identity, or privatized lawns, these spatial markings of place limit our definitions, anthropomorphize and cement homogenization. 

Utopias are products of the times as they are imagined, lacking a contextual awareness that understands self as a product of one’s own environment nor looking beyond finite temporal experience. Any current plan underestimates the malleability of markets, predispositions to the familiar, and anthropocentric inevitabilities. We still put on our minted leather and manipulate the cost of doing any business for our utopian leaders as they produce space within space.

We are all living out our own self-rationalized utopias, inviting others into them to affirm our beliefs. Ours and others’ contesting paradises make up this terrestrial chaos on which we find our ground. Searching for profound realizations is another ineffable tangle that adds to the jumbled complexity underfoot. A wise friend, however, summed up our collective paradox: What if I don’t like your utopia?