Two natures, one ambiguity, and the danger of its absence
exhibition image from Mugak/ Biennial 2025 | image by Mikel Blasco
not all utopias are the same
Utopias of Escape: Imaginaries Between Critique and Desire
Utopias of escape offer an imaginary refuge from the contradictions of the present and function as cultural safety valves that express the desire for a different possible life and constitute forms of critical escape. From nomadism, voluntary confinement, or adaptive architectures, all of them explore escape as voluntary exclusion—geographical and existential—through the creation of new imaginaries.
New Babylon is the name that Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys gave to a large-scale project developed between 1956 and 1974. Conceived as a global city, free of borders, composed of large, elevated, and transformable structures, New Babylon presents itself as a space in constant metamorphosis, designed to welcome a humanity liberated from productive labor and fully dedicated to play, creation, and experimental living. A territory of freedom and exploration in which architecture ceases to be a fixed framework and becomes a malleable instrument of social experimentation.
Today, Constant’s proposal remains remarkably relevant. In the face of a globalized urban model marked by the standardization of spaces, the commodification of leisure, and the centrality of productivity, New Babylon challenges the contemporary imagination by positioning play, mobility, and creativity as the axes of spatial organization. The growing dematerialization of work, the nomadic mobility of broad social sectors, and the expansion of global communication networks seem to give substance—albeit in a fragmentary and contradictory manner—to some of Constant’s intuitions. At the same time, the climate and migration crisis, inequality, and the transformation of dwelling practices reopen the interest in thinking of the city as a collective project oriented toward emancipation rather than solely toward economic efficiency.
exhibition image from Mugak/ Biennial 2025 | image by Mikel Blasco
Regenerative utopias: Experimental cartographies for the future
In an urban world marked by deep inequalities, architectural imagination can be a political and transformative tool. Regenerative utopias seek to reverse the physical and social deterioration of cities, not only by recovering what has been lost, but by proposing new ways of living and coexisting. Here architecture ceases to be mere construction and becomes a medium that creates bonds, projects futures, and draws new maps of possibilities. Two experiences stand out in this context:
The Available City, conceived by architect and urban planner David Brown, is a proposal for urban intervention based on a striking statistic: the city of Chicago has approximately 13,000 vacant lots, an area equivalent to twice the size of its downtown core. David Brown proposes viewing these vacant sites as an interconnected system rather than isolated lots, to create new public spaces and reconfigure the urban fabric starting from the plot, its smallest unit. In 2021, this concept was chosen as the central theme of the 4th Chicago Architecture Biennial, becoming a laboratory for urban experimentation. The results included play spaces, sports facilities, temporary cultural centers, and community gardens, demonstrating the versatility of the model and its capacity to generate networks of collaboration between architects, residents, collectives, and public administration.
Available City | image courtesy of David Brown
Available City | image courtesy of David Brown
Available City | image courtesy of David Brown
Available City | image courtesy of David Brown
More than 9,000 kilometers away, in Accra, architect, academic, and writer Lesley Lokko founded the African Futures Institute, an educational and critical thinking platform dedicated to envisioning African futures from within the continent itself. From its beginnings, the African Futures Institute has expanded its reach into curatorial practice and the organization of exhibitions, consolidating its international reputation through its participation in the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. This institution recognizes that, on the youngest and fastest-urbanizing continent on the planet, it is urgent to rethink how architects and urban planners are trained—not only for Africa’s future, but with the understanding that this future impacts the entire world.
This African educational organization is establishing itself as a platform for imagining African futures from within the continent itself, placing issues such as decolonization, climate change, migration, and social justice at the center. In its vision, architecture is the capacity to imagine and build futures in which regeneration and social justice are interwoven, turning utopia into a living practice, a collective process, and the act of rewriting the present.
exhibition image from Mugak/ Biennial 2025 | image by Mikel Blasco
lesley lokko at the opening of Mugak/ Biennial 2025 | image by Mikel Blasco
The Threshold: meeting point between utopia and dystopia
Between the promise of a better future and the fear of its oppressive drift, the thin line that separates utopia from dystopia becomes fertile ground for architectural and social imagination. That intermediate space, where the ideal merges with the precarious and the collective with the provisional, reveals the fragility of our ways of living.
Inverted Tents, by architect Aristide Antonas, embodies this ambiguity: beds suspended in abandoned buildings invert domestic logic, freeing up floor space for communal life and the creation of new bonds. But that same gesture that promises community also evokes the precariousness of shelter, the echo of ruin, and contemporary vulnerability. Antonas’s project emerged in Athens between 2010 and 2012, a period marked by economic collapse and the proliferation of functional ruins. Its aim is not to reinforce individual autonomy, but to generate conditions for collective practices and encounters. The project also connects with the idea of the “empty university,” proposing to bring together immigrant and local students in shared environments—not as a substitute for housing for the poor, but as an experiment in coexistence based on contingency and the reuse of existing infrastructures.
In that unresolved tension between utopia and dystopia, a field of reflection opens about how to imagine the common without denying the instability that sustains it. It is at once a critique of the inaccessibility of housing and an exercise that oscillates between utopia—imagining alternative modes of coexistence—and dystopia—through its inevitable evocation of refugee camps and other conflicts, recalling the harshness of forced displacement and contemporary precariousness.
Today, largely overtaken by the surrounding reality, utopias seem to have fallen into disrepute. The prevailing pragmatism limits the space for imagining better futures. An absence that is full of danger, because, as the French philosopher and anthropologist Paul Ricoeur warns, ‘a society without utopia is a society without purpose, a society without direction.’
Inverted Tents | image courtesy of Aristide Antonas
exhibition image of ‘Inverted Tents’ by Aristide Antonas | image by Mikel Blasco
Maria Arana Zubiate | image by Olga Ruiz
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