This second AHRC-funded workshop sought to explore how failure is experienced and navigated within conceptions of utopian thought and practice.

The general aim of our paper was to explore the precarious relationship between success and failure underpinning certain attempts from the world of business and corporations to envisage and build towns and cities based on utopian
principles. We argued that contained in these projects (e.g., Ford’s Fordlândia, Disney’s E.P.C.O.T., Google’s North Bayshore, and Meta’s [i.e., Facebook’s] Willow Village) are attempts to reconcile the imperatives of business with elements of social and economic utopias through the designing of communities where these tensions and contradictions can coinhabit a shared space. The success of these towns is predicated on the continuation and intensification of the very dystopian tensions that make them possible.

Our paper explored these tensions through a focus on Henry Ford's failed attempt to build a utopian city in the heart of the Amazon: Fordlândia.