The Ultimate City: Understanding of Utopia and Dystopia

Reference from Wikipedia:

Utopia (/juːˈtoʊpiə/)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia

is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was coined in Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt to create an ideal society, and fictional societies portrayed in literature. It has spawned other concepts, most prominently dystopia.

The Double Meaning of UTOPIA:
The word comes from the Greek: οὐ ("not") and τόπος ("place") and means "no place". The English homophone eutopia, derived from the Greek εὖ ("good" or "well") and τόπος ("place"), means "good place". This, due to the identical pronunciation of "utopia" and "eutopia", gives rise to a double meaning.



Dystopia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia

A dystopia is the idea of a society, generally of a speculative future, characterized by negative, anti-utopian elements, varying from environmental to political and social issues. Dystopian societies, usually hypothesized by writers of fiction, have culminated into a broad series of sub-genres, and is often used to raise the subject of issues or concerns regarding society, environment, politics, religion, psychology or spirituality that may become present in the future. For this reason, Dystopias have taken the form of a multitude of speculations, such as Pollution; Poverty; Societal collapse or Political repression and Totalitarianism. Famous depictions of Dystopian societies include Nineteen Eighty-Four, a totalitarian invasive super state; Brave New World, where the human population is placed under a caste of psychological allocation and Fahrenheit 451 where the state burns books out of fear of what they may incite. The Iron Heel was described by Erich Fromm as "the earliest of the modern Dystopian"[1].

The word derives from Ancient Greek: δυσ-, "bad, hard",[2] and Ancient Greek: τόπος, "place, landscape"[3]. It can alternatively be called cacotopia,[4][5] or anti-utopia.

From the meaning we found that the term "Utopia" is an idealized place which doest not exist as it it too perfect. Since there is no absolute perfection and completion in physical world, we can not define a place as absolutely "utopian" or "dystopian". Thus these two concepts are opposite, contradictory and intertwining.

The two relative and countervailing ideas remind me of  antonyms such as "Fire and Water", "Land and Ocean", "Black and White". They are all contrary towards each other, but at the same time, they are closely linked and interdependent.


- Alicia