Practical Utopia Terms of Reference

By Wayne Brown
Practical Utopias


  • What would we eat?
  • Where would we live?
  • Political Structures?
  • Health Care?
  • Women?
  • Education of children?
  • Location-specific depending on climate
    • Geology
    • Water
    • Resources
  • No free lunch
  • 2nd law of thermodynamics
  • Unknown Unknowns
  • Reality Test (how's that going?)
  • What do things really cost?
  • Not SF epics
  • Use building blocks we already have
  • What can go wrong?
  • Collaborative - we need a stake in the project
  • Circles
  • Knowing past attempts at Utopia
    • Problems of their time
    • Problems of our time are different
  • Poverty
  • Internet and the dark side
  • Dark side of everything
  • Visualization tricks around 34 mins
  • Giving alternatives plus and minus
  • What does success look like after 10 months?
  • Innovation and scale (37 mins)
  • Summer camp or grownups
  • How would you game the system (39 mins)
  • 3d printed houses
  • underground house - poor views
  • "Participant role"?
  • 8-week course. Worth it?
  • "experience" open Sept 23 for $99 - probably a great idea, but closed

Terms of reference for Calgary2200

Constraints are great, but the Practical Utopia 2022 constraints are too tight. They had the effect of making the projects rather silly.

I accept the constraints below except for the timeline.

Atwood's ideas from the video are noted and respected. We want to have a learning, respectful dialogue, which means "First, Seek To Understand."

Terms of reference For 2022 Projects

Over the course of eight weeks from September to November 2022, Fellows collaborated as a member of one of eight teams and engaged in a highly ambitious collaborative world-building process guided by a facilitator and supported by an illustrator to help visualize their imagined worlds. Their challenge was to co-design a possible future that embraced the following constraints:
  • 10 years from our present day
  • Specific to a chosen geography
  • Sustainable (i.e. carbon negative or neutral)
  • Scaleable
  • Attractive enough so that people will want to embrace it
  • No magic wands: Must leverage solutions that already exist today in some form or have existed in the past
Within their teams, Fellows worked together in smaller subgroups to explore the following topics:
MATERIAL WORLDS
SOCIAL WORLDS
Shelter
Education
Water
Health
Food
Gender Equality
Clothing
Arts & Culture
Electricity
Governance
Transportation
Communication
Waste
Wealth & Financial Systems
Death & Human Remains
Faith & Spirituality

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