Community, Space, Utopia

Utopia is typically associated with community.Despite the existence of individual, "private" utopias, traditionally, a utopia does exist for a single human being but for a group of people -a community.If we set aside the more sinister version of utopia, the so-called dystopia (which also has groups of humans as its focus) and look at the 'positive' utopia, the eu-topia, then the relation of utopia to community becomes evident.Bringing this issue to the fore, eu-topian scenarios are about the "good", the "right", or the "proper" community.These communities need proper spaces, both in terms of physical architecture and a non-physical social organization. FrameworksThis in turn depends on assumptions -whether explicitly stated or not -about the form that such a "good" community takes, and this in turn rests on assumptions about the human being, about the conditio humana the utopian community in question relates to.Many of these assumptions (if not the vast majority of them) are rooted in a culture-specific heritage and are commonly considered under the umbrella term "cultural heritage".According to the definition of heritage (in this case, the Cambridge Dictionary), heritage is made up of "features belonging to the culture of a particular society…which come from the past and are still important."1 Fig. 1: Tree of Life as cultural heritage 2Heritage is more than just tradition.Heritage has an active component to it; it is so-1