I've been designing my own utopian world as a private hobby since 1984 as an imaginative escape from this increasingly dystopian world we live in. when I was at Cambridge University in 1979-80 it was Utopia: and I have used that place and those memories as my template for an ideal world. I'm such a fool. I find Gehry et al ghastly.

one man's utopia is another man's dystopia

A good read is Foucault's Heterotopias... According to Foucault, Utopia is not a real place, it has always been no place, a realm of our imagination. It has been sometimes escapist, and sometimes a tool--like what feminists call utopian praxis--, a means of imagining new possibilities other than what are given to us. Today, science fiction can sometimes be utopian and dystopian.

On the other hand, Foucault says there are real places that do exist that are simply different, other spaces, where the real and the imagined play together:

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.Heterotopias are like a mirror, they reflect our culture and all other spaces, but they are different such that if you can gain access to them you can see all other places from a margin rather than from within... Your imagination is more free.Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.What today are the vessels of imagination? Are we now a civilization without "boats"? I wonder what Foucault would have to say about cyberspace? Or the spaces of subculture-- the transient cities of raves, etc.?