Overview

This multidisciplinary book explores the utopian impulses in modern social thought, tackling the most pressing and interconnected planetary challenges. It combines a reconsideration of our dystopian present with a critical investigation of socio-spatial utopias, which suggest alternative modes for human-nature and inter-human interactions in an imagined sustainable, dialogical, and inclusive world. Based on a content analysis of scholarly publications, policy documents, and intergovernmental agendas, four analytical chapters systematise visions which shape the contours of contemporary socio-ecological, socio-economic, socio-cultural, and socio-political utopianism. Addressing the most existential global risks, utopian futures require more than sustainable development, degrowth, or global justice. The book explicitly underscores the urgent need for an open-minded dialogue, an inclusive knowledge order, lasting peace, and other marginalised concepts which can contribute to dismantling the bastions of particularism and facilitating collective actions. Among many competing visions, the main challenge is how to integrate the most progressive ideas into a coherent utopia for a future which all want and a future which fits all. The book is written in the common language of the knowledge that is co-created by the fields of global studies, political and cultural geography, environmental sociology, and international relations. The multidisciplinary approach makes this work appropriate reading for researchers, social thinkers, policymakers, and students who are interested in contemporary planetary utopias.

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9781041031369

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Author Information

Valentin Mihaylov is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Social and Economic Geography and Spatial Management, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland.

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