A Brief History Of Utopias (Season 7 Finale, Episode 25)

Utopia was written as a joke. Bishops, billionaires and Henry Ford tried to build it anyway. Here’s how that went.

In the Season 7 finale of History’s Greatest Idiots, we trace 500 years of people trying to build paradise. Thomas More’s Utopia was a joke about an island on a river with no water, so why did so many people treat it as a blueprint?

We visit the Mexican towns a bishop built from its pages in the 1530s, George Pullman’s company town and the strike that broke it, and Henry Ford’s doomed Midwestern suburb in the Amazon rain forest, Fordlandia. Then it’s Britain’s quainter efforts, from King Charles’s Poundbury to Portmeirion, home of The Prisoner.

Then we look at today’s Utopian dreamers: billionaires! Saudi Arabia’s shrinking megacity The Line, California Forever, and Prospera, the private city now suing Honduras for $11 billion. And in North Korea’s Propaganda Village, the lights come on by timer in buildings nobody lives in.

So which utopias actually last? The answer is less glamorous, and more hopeful, than you’d think.

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Editor: Sonika Chandel

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