Tom Milner-Gulland: The Globally Created Utopia
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The capital city is, then, designed to present and perpetuate an air of culturally infused colour. A through-flow of visitors and inhabitants sustains vibrancy in the culture. There are few constraints from a spatial point of view and public transportation operates by silent, cold-fusion powered monorail. Most vehicles, similarly silent, are vertical-takeoff-vertical-land mechanisms employing electrogravitics, a technology, based on the generation of ‘electronic wind’, developed to the point of feasibility, as was cold fusion, in the Twentieth Century – this fact having been suppressed on account of the oil economy. In a heavily polluted world, Nucleus, with its system of recycling waste, is almost pollution-free. With the problem of congestion relieved, camels may walk into the city centre, enabling trade between the citizens of nucleus and desert nomads.
Every few months a resettling of the immigrants, many being refugees, occurs and the walls of domestic cubicles become pulled – in a process reminiscent of origami – into the rooms of larger, multi-storey houses; further structural amendments lay the foundations for self-expression and a sense of pride in the environment. Thus the organically developing capital becomes systematically, as opposed to haphazardly, upgraded, from the inside out, the structures becoming more permanent towards the centre. The silence and manoeuvrability of the hover vehicles involved and their low running costs enables a highly ambitious, on-going construction initiative.
Soundproofing, occasionally employing ‘white noise’ technology, is built into walls, the philosophy being that an individual may be afforded an acceptable quality of life even in an environment fraught with potentially undesirable conditions if they have only their own silence. Domestic products that occupy space, such as packaged foods, are made to tessellate where possible to maximize the available floor space. Communal computer terminals and free Internet access provide, as do other readily available means of electronic communication, instant links to services.
In the regions upon which the permanent residential structures exist, the capital divides into geographic, semi-autonomous regions, the aim being to promote mutual ‘on the field’ learning from different cultures and to enable assimilation of the different values in an environment which, from inception, is essentially free from social tensions (owing to the bonding that occurs among those fleeing from desperate circumstances), to the effect that virtues of every ethnic group prove to be commutable. The threat of there being increasing cultural divisions is diminished by the fact that the raison d’être of this scheme is to promote intermingling that takes the form of culturally explorative visits, with, for example, host families acting as a chief source of hospitality and information. Taking any specified region representing the geographical concentration of an ethnic group, there is, from the outset, a gradual attenuation – with distance from a recognized central point – of the proportion of the population that originates from any one ethnic background, in relation to the proportion from the neighbouring region, to the effect that the majority of the population lives in an ethnically diverse region. Those for whom such intermingling is discomforting may be free to live closer to the geographic centre of the region. It should be noted, however, that such centres exhibit their culture in colourful as opposed to grandiose forms of expression and it is a policy that religious symbols are not dominant of the environment or in any way imposing. The planning of the town is constitutionally observant of the need to sustain social gradations as a medium for the utopia’s fluent social and economic development. This aspect of the constitution is a metaphor for the perceived virtue that exists in diversity between different cultures on a worldwide scale. It seems that, in very general terms, the people born into a culture, when made conscious of their role among other peoples of the world, feel compelled to emphasize their sense of identity by preserving the set of fundamental principles that uniquely characterize their culture, thereby to contribute to humankind by reflecting positively a particular attribute of human disposition.
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