SEZs and FTZs are regions in which special concessions on tax and/or employment law are made in order to attract transnational businesses. As architect Keller Easterling has pointed out, 'special economic zones' and 'free trade zones' are also privateer utopias, as are their more technologically focused successors, 'technology parks' and 'smart cities'. The solutionism of Silicon Valley reveals a utopian metaproject whose only purpose is to generate more utopian projects, its borders artificially shored up by the support of its host stateĪs such, Silicon Valley might be thought of as a privateer utopia once we recall that the difference between a pirate and a privateer was that the latter carried a 'letter of marque': a document which excused piracy so long as it was performed (ideally with some degree of deniability) in the service of the sponsoring state.

This genre is alive and well not only in science fiction's greying fandoms, but in the global technoscientific discourse: while they lack the obsessive detail and vast scope that characterises more knowingly utopian narratives, the oft-repeated moral mythology and solutionism of Silicon Valley reveals its true nature – that of a utopian metaproject whose only purpose is to generate more utopian projects, its borders artificially shored up by the generous support of its host state. This is the appeal of all utopias, including the technological subtype once exemplified by 'golden age' science fiction, which burgeoned with Competent Men, Big Engineering and Yankee pragmatism. The appeal of the pirate utopia to its citizens is rooted in its offer of freedom from certain restrictions imposed in the world outside. Organised crime, prostitution, gambling and drugs propped up the local economy of the squatter population until it was finally evicted and demolished in 1994. It eventually went rogue – or was perhaps permitted to go rogue, once the British realised how hard it would be to shut down. Formed in 1971, when the city's countercultural underclass began squatting disused barracks on land belonging to the military, and inescapably reliant economically on the trade in controlled substances, Christiania has nonetheless lasted a long time in the face of widespread public opposition – presumably because it serves a purpose both as a societal safety-valve (or zone of exile, perhaps?) and a convenient folk devil for local politics.Ī more extreme example would be the nigh legendary Kowloon Walled City, a former enclave of the New Territories leased to the British after the Sino-Japanese war of the 1890s, which the Chinese government sought to reclaim after the defeat of the Japanese in the second world war by offering protection to would-be squatters. The Eurostoner's paradise of Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen is a rare example of an interstitial pirate utopia that has persisted for decades. But there is an argument to be made that all sociopolitical futures, regardless of their position on any given axis of political thought, are utopian projects – or, more plainly, that the literary and political phenomenon which we retrospectively label as 'utopianism' is the same thing we now label as 'futurism' or 'foresight', or 'town planning' or 'urbanism'.īut there is also a similarly lengthy tradition of bottom-up utopias, from the anarchic (and possibly fictional) 'free port' pirate utopias of the Barbary corsairs, through the Diggers and Levellers and various peasants' movements, and on into the present day. The Manifesto and the Constitution both attempt to define a perfected social order – and while their respective admirers would likely bridle at the utopian accusation, with its implications of naivete and outright fictionality, they would likely level those same accusations at any opposing ideological narrative.Īs such, 'utopianism' has become an accusatory stick with which to beat an opponent's vision. But this in turn suggests that the category of utopias is larger and more contentious than it might initially appear: after all, if the Communist Manifesto was a blueprint for a perfected society, then the same must surely be true of the United States Constitution.

Ortelius map of utopia wikimedia