Utopia Begins in the Present

By Raneem Alji, Concept Design for Architecture Yacademy 2026

As an architect, I often find myself asking a simple question: what makes a place perfect to live in? In residential projects, I ask clients about their ideal home, how they spend their day, where they want to gather, where they need privacy, and what makes them feel comfortable. Every answer is different, yet the intention is usually the same: to create a place in which someone can imagine living well. For a long time, I thought the challenge was to gather these needs and translate them into the best possible design. Then my first lecture at Yacademy was about Utopia, and I began to wonder whether a “perfect place” could really exist in the way I had imagined it.

Growing up, the word Utopia immediately brought to mind the Arabic expression Al-Madina al-Fadila (المدينة الفاضلة), the virtuous or ideal city. I imagined order, good infrastructure, equality, beautiful spaces, and a city in which everything somehow worked as it should. It was easy to think of perfection as something that could eventually be designed if we found the right combination of architecture, planning, and technology.

During that first lecture, however, the discussion started to complicate this image. We looked at historical visions such as those of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, where geometry and order became ways of imagining a better society. Then the conversation moved toward a much more personal understanding of Utopia. One person described it simply as a place of safety. Someone else reflected on cities that had been conceived with utopian ambitions and still failed the people living in them. At one point, someone said: “We forget that human is nature.”

I kept thinking about that sentence.

If Utopia means a perfect place, then perfect for whom?

A person living through war might imagine perfection as a night of uninterrupted sleep. Someone who has been displaced might imagine it as the ability to return home. Someone living in an overcrowded city might dream of space, while another person living in isolation might value density, activity, and human contact. The more I thought about it, the less convincing the idea of a single perfect environment became.

Maybe the perfect place is shaped by what is missing from the present.

That changed the way I thought about the question I had been asking my clients. When someone describes their “perfect home,” they are rarely giving me an abstract definition of perfection. They are speaking from their existing life. They may want a larger kitchen because cooking brings the family together. They may ask for a garden because they miss having a relationship with nature. They may want privacy because their current home does not provide it. Their ideal space begins with something they already experience, value, or lack.

The same idea can be applied to the city.

One discussion during the course made me think about why some urban spaces attract us while others, even beautifully designed ones, remain empty. I became interested in the idea of friction. A city becomes alive through people crossing paths, overlapping activities, different rhythms, accidental encounters, negotiation, and unpredictability. These conditions are messy. They are difficult to control. Yet they are often what make a place interesting enough for us to stay.

This raised another problem with my earlier idea of perfection. If we design a city where everything is fully ordered, separated, predictable, and controlled, we may also remove the very conditions that make urban life human.

Perhaps the perfect place needs imperfection.

Historical architecture made this question even more interesting for me. During the course, we discussed early Islamic hospitals in Syria, where water, gardens, light, comfort, and spatial organisation contributed to an environment of care. We also looked at traditional systems in Iran that allowed communities to produce and preserve ice in extremely hot climates. What interested me in these examples was how directly architecture responded to life.

They were shaped by climate, available resources, human needs, local knowledge, and the conditions of their time. This made me question another assumption I had carried with me: that the ideal city must somehow belong to the future.

Sometimes the answer is already present in the way people have learned to live.

A place can become better through technology, yet it can also become better through remembering knowledge that has been forgotten. The future does not always have to erase the past in order to improve the present.

This became particularly important when Liam Young's lecture introduced another way of thinking about speculative futures. I had often associated speculation with science-fiction images: flying cars, jetpacks, food in pills, and technologies that seem far removed from ordinary life. His lecture made me think about speculation differently. We can begin with technologies that already exist and ask where they could take us.

That idea came back strongly when my teammate and I started our final project: a speculative city capable of coexisting with nuclear power.

At first, there was an obvious architectural temptation. We could imagine a completely new city on an isolated brownfield, separated from existing urban areas, and build an ideal future from zero.

Yet something about that approach no longer made sense to us.

Why should imagining a better future require escaping from the present?

If the idea of Utopia had started to mean responding to what is missing today, then our project had to begin with the realities of today as well. We became interested in how existing urban life could coexist with new forms of infrastructure and technology. Nuclear power therefore became part of a larger question about the relationship between people, infrastructure, nature, risk, and everyday life.

We stopped asking only what the future city should look like.

We started asking what it should feel like to live there.

Would infrastructure separate people or bring new opportunities into the city? Would technology remain something distant and inaccessible, or become part of everyday urban life? Could large technological systems coexist with human scale, public space, nature, and social interaction?

At some point during the project, I realised that my original question had shifted again.

Maybe a perfect place cannot be judged only through its buildings.

It has to be understood through relationships.

The relationship between people and each other. Between buildings and streets. Between infrastructure and community. Between technology and daily life. Between nature and human activity. Between memory and change.

This also helped me understand an idea from Santiago Calatrava that stayed with me: whatever we express on the outside should somehow be translated into the inside. I began to read this beyond the scale of a single building. If a city presents itself as sustainable, inclusive, innovative, or human-centred, then those ideas should be experienced in everyday life. They cannot remain only in drawings, masterplans, or architectural language.

A place has to live up to what it promises.

This is where I returned to a sentence I had written after my first Utopia lecture: my utopian place is one that respects human dignity and variety.

I understand that sentence differently now. Dignity means that architecture begins by recognising what already exists. People arrive with memories, habits, traditions, relationships, fears, expectations, and their own understanding of home. Places also carry stories, climates, materials, and ways of living that existed before the architect arrived.

Maybe our task is less about creating an ideal life for people and more about understanding the life that is already there, including what supports it and what makes it difficult. This is one reason I remain drawn to humanitarian and vernacular architecture. They remind me that the architect never begins from zero. We enter a story that is already happening.

I often think of architects as authors, yet perhaps authorship in architecture is always shared. The people who inhabit a place are co-authors. Nature participates in the story. History participates in it. Technology increasingly participates in it too.

And this brings me back to the question I started with:

What makes a place perfect to live in?

I am still not sure there is a final answer, and maybe that is the point.

Perfection cannot be reduced to flawless geometry, advanced technology, beautiful architecture, or complete order. A meaningful place responds to the people who live there and to the particular reality they inhabit. It gives space for difference, interaction, memory, adaptation, and change. It understands what is missing today while leaving room for what may be needed tomorrow.

I began Yacademy thinking about Utopia as a destination, a perfect place that architecture might someday be able to create, and I left thinking of it more as a question: What does this place need to become better for the lives already happening within it?

Maybe architecture begins there.