For me, a uto­pia is actu­ally an unreach­able place that only exists in my ima­gin­a­tion. I think rather pess­im­ist­ic­ally and fol­low the sci­entif­ic insight that we have no future as human­ity because of the destruc­tion we cause. And this end is very near.
My gut feel­ing is dif­fer­ent. When I read that an anim­al spe­cies that was already con­sidered extinct is now hav­ing off­spring again, I get the feel­ing that I have hope — and this hope­ful feel­ing is uto­pi­an think­ing for me.
I ima­gine a bet­ter world in such a way that we don’t abol­ish our world (or parts of it, as it has happened in many vis­ions), but per­ceive it dif­fer­ently than we do now, by see­ing everything around us (and espe­cially ourselves) as bounded and inter­con­nec­ted and by grant­ing each indi­vidu­al a right to exist, every cloud and every tree, the glass on our table and the food we eat and ourselves. We would exper­i­ence ourselves in a large inter­woven net­work, which would help us to live in and with this world and not from it.
I ima­gine a form of set­tle­ment in which there would be no dis­tinc­tion between city and coun­try, but cit­ies crowned with plants and trees (on the roofs and bal­conies), with lakes and forests in the middle. There would be no escape from the cit­ies into a roman­ti­cized coun­try life, because the whole earth would be seen from the out­side in the uni­verse, so to speak, with a view from out­side, and would thus be pleas­ant for the inhab­it­ants* every­where, in every place.
In this ideal, uto­pi­an life, there would be no sep­ar­a­tion of the gen­er­a­tions either, because they would live togeth­er. Short jour­neys would be abol­ished because jour­neys would be giv­en a dif­fer­ent status and would be slow and long.
The uto­pi­an thing about it is above all that every human being, anim­al, ele­ment of nature, spir­itu­al entity or oth­er sac­red dimen­sion would have its own right to exist, agency and rights and would not always have to defend itself against oth­ers. I myself would paint, write, do research, swim and feel at home in the middle of my life between my aging par­ents and my grow­ing son. This sounds pathet­ic and kitschy, but this increased emo­tion­al dia­logue would indeed be my wish for the future.