Utopistics is the serious assessment of historical alternatives, the exercise of our judgment as to the substantive rationality of alternative possible historical systems. It is this sober, rational, and realistic evaluation of human social systems, the constraints on what they can be, and the zones open to human creativity. Not the face of the perfect (and inevitable) future, but in the face of an alternative, credibly better, and historically possible (but far from certain) future. It is the us an exercise simultaneously in science, in politics, and in morality.
Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics: Or, the Historical Choices of the Twentieth Century, (New York, New Press, 1998.) pp 1-2
r-lab: architecture/ cities/ utopias 