Is a Utopian Society Possible?
Utopia is defined by Dictionary.com as “an imaginary island described in Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) as enjoying perfection in law, politics, etc”. When I hear the word utopia I think of a place where
everything is perfect, there is no violence, no environmental issues or
financial struggles and especially no spiders, I can’t stand those creepy
creatures. Anyway, in this place there is just peace and serenity, but everyone
has their own idea of what a utopian city would be like. In fact, throughout
history there have been plans, and attempts to create utopian cities. One of
which being Germania which was the planned capital of the Nazis. Hitler had a
plan to turn Berlin into the Nazis’ futuristic capital. He put his architect
Albert Speer in charge of creating the city. It would of had a stadium that
could hold up to about 400,000 people, and a grand hall which would have been
the largest enclosed space in the world being able to hold about 180,000 people.
The war and geological complications caused building of the capital to stop. On
the right is an interpretation of what the city would’ve looked like.
There is actually a
“Utopian city” being built today in South Korea. The city is Songdo and every
aspect of it is controlled be a network of computers. The build of this city
has been supported by the IT corporation Cisco along with Korean city planners.
The city has many cool different features such as the way that garbage is
disposed of. There are underground pipes connected to all offices, and
apartment buildings and the trash goes through these pipes and is automatically
sorted either to be recycled, used for fuel, or just buried. There are no trash
cans on the street corners or garbage trucks patrolling the city. The entire
thing can be managed by just seven workers. The city is designed to leave a
small carbon footprint. There are more technological advancements in
development like a micro-chip being put into a child’s bracelet to track them so
the child would not get lost. At least now when you go out with your friend s
your parents won’t call a hundred times asking where you are and what are you
doing. No matter how cool the city is it still has its problems, the major one
being its incapability to attract business and could be doomed to meet a
similar fate as the utopian cities before it. The city should be completed in
2018, but that is no guarantee since to completion date was already pushed back
a couple of times. 
There were many more
attempts at creating a utopian city throughout history and some aspects of
those ideas have been adopted in our society today. Such as the plan for a garden
city created by Ebenezer Howard in 1902 which gave the idea for suburbs (on the
right). The real question is why did they all fail or more importantly can a
utopian society be achieved? Wislawa Szymborska wrote a poem titled “Utopia” in
which she describes her version of what a Utopia should be like. What she describes
is a perfect place, everything is simple, and one could comprehend every aspect
of our lives, but yet no human enters this place, why? Is it because people
want to figure out the answers themselves, or is because there are some
questions that people don’t want the answers to? “The Tree of
Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple, sprouts by the spring called Now
I Get It” (Szymborska). She uses nature
to show how everything in this utopia is simple and all of life’s problems can
be solved here, or Could she be saying is the key to unlocking the secrets of
the world is in nature itself, but we are blinded by out imperfections we are unable
to see it? “For all its charms, the island is uninhabited, and the faint footprints
scattered on its beaches turn without exception to the sea” (Szymborska). It is a carefree perfect world, and maybe that’s why
she says the place is inhabited because can a perfect world exist when its
filled with imperfect beings? We are making all of these technological
advancements that a utopian society is beginning to look like a possibility to
us or could it all just be wishful thinking? It’s like figuring out how many
licks does it take to get to a center of a tootsie pop “The world may never
know”.
Works Cited
Arbes, Ross, and Charles Bethea. "Songdo, South Korea: City of the
Future." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media
Company, 14 Sept. 2014. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.
"Germania: Hitler's Dream Capital." Germania: Hitler's Dream
Capital | History Today. N.p., n.d. Web. 12
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