ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author considers what it might mean to think of utopia as a place by drawing on approaches that position place as a dynamic, intra-active form. Unpacking the operation of this good place is undertaken through rethinking concepts central to political theory: power, freedom and democracy, in keeping with Cooper's claim that utopias provide space from which such concepts can be rethought. To illustrate this more fully, the author theorizes in part from small-scale examples of such good place-making within the here-and-now in the form of musical improvisation and radical experiments in education, although his claim is that these are also partially beyond the here-and-now, and so they can only ever be ambiguously understood as being within it. His attempt here is to think through how utopianism might proceed from this unequal material organization by attending to identity as a locus through which this domination is organized, as urged by a number of utopian studies scholars.
