500 Years of Utopia: Governing Paradise
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Add to Calendar 2016-10-15 13:00:00 2016-10-15 14:00:00 500 Years of Utopia: Governing Paradise Doheny Memorial Library 01:00 pm 02:00 pm America/Los_Angeles public
For 500 years, utopia—a word coined by Sir Thomas More to describe the ideal city—has been used as popular shorthand for a perfect world and lies at the heart of the Western political imagination. But what does it really mean today in the context of 21st-century urbanism, especially in a megacity like Los Angeles that has been the setting for utopian and dystopian thinking almost since its founding? Three discussions, marking the December 2016 half-millennium anniversary of the book’s publication, consider L.A.’s relation to Utopia from diverse perspectives, amid questions about the area’s natural and built environments, political representation, imagined futures, and large-scale, intractable problems such as homelessness and income inequality.