The first season of ?Nice Try!? tells the stories of the world?s most fascinating attempts at utopian communities What?s a perfect place" And how do we get there"
Utopia is a tantalizing pursuit that?s remained achingly elusive ever since the word ?utopia? was coined by author Thomas More in the 1500s. Since then, there have been countless attempts to define and realize a perfect place, and with them, countless almosts, close calls, and abject misses. But each failure holds lessons: When Edison talked about his dogged crusade to invent a lightbulb, he (supposedly) said he hadn?t failed; he just found 10,000 ways it didn?t work.
The utopian impulse is very much alive today, expressed in ways small and large, from how we personalize our homes and improve our communities to how we reshape our political systems. Many of these themes are familiar to Curbed readers. Now we?re exploring them in a new way: Curbed?s first narrative podcast, Nice Try!, debuts on May 30 with a seven-episode arc produced in collaboration with Vox Media Podcast Network. In Season 1, Utopian, host Avery Trufelman (99 Percent Invisible, Articles of Interest) reexamines some of history?s most fascinating attempts to build more perfect communities, including the capital city for a newly democratic India, an integrated midcentury suburb outside Philadelphia, and a self-sustaining closed ecosystem in the Arizona desert.
These attempts expressed unique brands of idealism, and often?but not ...