500 Years of Utopia: Governing Paradise

Event
October 15, 2016 - October 15, 2016
1pm
Doheny Memorial Library

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.