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Contribution type: New Translation of a Definition
Concept: Concepts:Eutopía
Name of the contributor: Carlos Tornel
E-mail of the contributor: tornelc@gmail.com
The word eutopia comes from the Greek eu (good) and topos (place), and literally means “the good place.” Unlike utopia (ou-topos, “no place”), which refers to a future, nonexistent promise, eutopia points to real, already-existing places where ways of life alternative to the dominant order are being prefigured. In this entry, inspired by the thought of Jean Robert, eutopia is developed as an embodied experience of rupture with capitalist modernity, visible in autonomous, vernacular, and communal practices that resist the war against subsistence, technological excess, and the emptying of place by abstract space. Drawing on concepts such as counterproductivity, thinking with one’s feet, and the critique of radical monopolies—in dialogue with Ivan Illich—it is argued that eutopia is not a plan or a goal, but rather a daily commitment to ways of inhabiting that sustain life through rootedness, reciprocity, and proportion. Far from offering an ideal future, eutopia invites us to rediscover the fragments of the good world that still persist amid the collapse of modernity.
Contents
Definition and origins of the concept
Eutopia, as taken up by Jean Robert (2022a), is proposed as a radical distinction from the concept of utopia. Whereas utopia refers to a “no place” (ou-topos), that is, an imaginary projection of an absent future, eutopia (eu-topos, the good place) points to the already-present existence of real prefigurations that announce other ways of life. Far from totalizing programs or systems and from the teleological horizon of development, eutopia manifests in concrete experiences of rupture with capitalist modernity that make it possible to glimpse the emergence of the other (that which has been devalued by modernity) in the here and now.
The concept was developed by Jean Robert, and although it was not developed in writing, it follows a long tradition of what could be classified as a vernacular form of thought and action that seeks to break with the logics of dependence of modernity and development, while at the same time proposing a prefigurative politics rooted in the practice of everyday life. The concept appears once in the book Más allá del feminismo: caminos para andar (Millán, 2014), in a direct reference to Robert; even so, after a meticulous review of his written work I do not find a direct reference to the concept, which leads me to argue that, following in the footsteps of Iván Illich, Jean Robert likely used it in an oral practice, thinking about the importance of practice over theory. It is from this reading that we propose a view of this concept by following Jean Robert’s thought and taking up several of his concepts and ideas, which were always embodied in his practice.
Eutopia is inscribed in a radical commitment to life: it cannot appear in a world governed by abstractions, planning, and growth; rather, it only appears in small-scale practices, in community assemblages and reciprocity, consensual decision-making, the administration of communal justice, gender ordering in a non-hierarchical key, or the active inclusion of differences. These are practices that recover community sovereignty from the margins of a world that has been devastated by the logic of capital, technological excess, and the standardization of existence (Robert, 2022a). Eutopia does not seek to conquer the future, but to sustain what already exists in terms of resistance and regeneration. This perspective resonates with Ivan Illich’s proposals on autonomy, subsistence, and conviviality, with whom Robert maintained a fertile dialogue for more than three decades.
Eutopia is thinking with one’s feet
Jean Robert’s thought begins from the body and from place. “Thinking with one’s feet” was one of his maxims: an embodied philosophy that opposes the fetishism of abstract, technocratic, and disembodied knowledge (Sicilia, 2022). Faced with homo technologicus, homo transportandus, or homo oeconomicus, Robert proposes the walker: not the consumer of infrastructures, but the person who moves by their own means, at a human scale, without being expropriated of their senses or their rootedness. This gesture is not nostalgic or romantic, but profoundly political: it is an act of autonomy in the face of the radical monopolies of mobility, energy, education, or medicine (Illich, 1978).
Eutopia, in this sense, is also a practical critique of the war against subsistence. According to Robert (2022b), for more than five centuries modernity has waged a systematic offensive against autonomous ways of life, devaluing any activity that does not submit to the logic of the market. This war operates through the production of scarcity, by destroying or devaluing the material, political, and social conditions that make it possible to live without depending on institutions, experts, industries, or states. As Illich (1978) showed in La convivencialidad, and Robert in Los pobres reinventan la política (2012), poverty has been transformed into misery through the destruction of vernacular economies and practices.
Robert argues that modernity has profoundly transformed the meaning of poverty, turning it into a condition of structural dependence. Following Illich, he proposes that the “modern poor” are modernized poor, forced to consume goods that were once signs of wealth and that today are imposed necessities (Robert, 2012). Poverty ceases to be a form of autonomous subsistence and is redefined as lack in relation to commodified standards. Modern economic thought contributes to this transformation by imposing scarcity as an axiom, denying the capacities, knowledges, and ways of life of the poor. Empirical and community knowledges have been systematically despised in a process of epistemicide.
Modern transport, for example, is a counterproductive technology that very clearly reflects the way scarcity reproduces the notion of modernized poverty: it promises speed, but devours time; it promises freedom, but generates dependence; it promises mobility, but destroys the territorial and community fabric. Highways, private cars, high-speed trains, or even low-cost flights, far from bringing us closer, disconnect us from place. The difference between space and place is fundamental here. Modern space is abstract, homogeneous, and plannable; place is embodied, symbolic, lived. The former allows the circulation of commodities and bodies as interchangeable units; the latter sustains memory, affectivity, rootedness. Modernity, with its logic of urbanization, digitalization, and technocratic planning, has replaced places with functional spaces. Eutopia, by contrast, is a poetics of place: “the will to be rooted expressed in the act of walking” (Beck, 2022). This poetics is also expressed in the concrete practices that Jean Robert promoted and built: dry toilets, self-built housing, ecological latrines, defense of communal territories, participation in struggles such as those of Casino de la Selva, Atenco, or Zapatismo. These are not technical solutions but ways of life that express an ethics of sufficiency and an aesthetics of proportion (Esteva, 2022).
Embodying Eutopia
Modernity not only destroys material alternatives; it also delegitimizes vernacular epistemologies, non-institutionalized knowledges, and ways of life that do not submit to the logic of exchange value. For this reason, eutopia does not appear in development plans or transition discourses, but at the margins: in the chacra that resists monoculture, in the assembly that refuses to delegate, in the artisanal gesture that refuses to be automated. But there, too, lies its force. Because in a world devastated by ecological collapse, digital fetishism, and the financialization of life, eutopian prefigurations become compasses pointing toward other horizons. It is not a matter of replacing the system with another, but of abandoning the logic of the system; not of reforming modernity, but of unwalking its presuppositions. Eutopia invites us to recover the good place: not the perfect place, but the possible place; not the total design, but just proportion; not the abstract promise, but embodied experience. As Jean Robert noted while evoking Gothic architecture, it is about traveling the path from flesh toward light, but also about returning from light back to earth, so as not to lose the ground that sustains us (Sicilia, 2022).
Eutopia, for example, vindicates a political and existential revalorization of “the poor,” not as objects of aid or as lacking development, but as subjects of knowledge and autonomous political action. Its critique is aimed at the misery induced by capitalism, which transforms the social fabric and destroys the conditions of subsistence, creating a world in which wealth and poverty do not exist in themselves, but as inseparable poles of a single destructive logic (Robert, 2012). In this sense, eutopia is not a project but a weave sustained through cooperation. Jean Robert did not leave us a closed theory, but a way of walking, a sensibility for the common, a radical structure in the sense that it is embodied in a defined place, that is not imposed from above but arises and is accompanied from the ground. This is why Robert defended the bicycle, walking on foot, and inhabitable territories and constructions as human-scale technologies that sustain the possibility of eutopia (Sicilia, 2022).
Perhaps the movements of Indigenous women who reinvent theory from the body, territory, and collectivity—articulating ancestral knowledges and gender struggles not from universalist abstraction, but from the embodiment of experience—embody eutopia as a principle of decolonial practice (Marcos, 2023). Autonomy is not conceived as absolute independence, but as situated interdependence. Eutopia as an embodied practice of good life in everyday life dialogues directly with the feminist epistemic insurgency that emerges “from below and to the left,” insofar as both propose horizons of transformation not projected into a utopian future, but anchored in living, present, resistant, and regenerative practices that are already taking place at the margins of the dominant system.
References
- Beck, H. (2022). Jean Robert: una poética del lugar. En: Bajo el Volcán, 6: 47-56.
- Esteva, G. (2022). Llegó el tiempo de Jean. En: Bajo el Volcán, 6: 31-45.
- Illich, I. (1978). La convivencialidad. México: FCE.
- Marcos, S. (2023). Una poética de la insurgencia zapatista. México: Akal.
- Millán, M. (Coord.) (2014). Más allá del feminismo: caminos para andar. México: Red de Feminismos Descoloniales.
- Robert, J. (2012). Los pobres reinventan la política. Tamoanchan, Revista de Ciencias y Humanidades, 1: 1-37.
- Robert, J. (2022a). Producción. En: Bajo el Volcán, 6: 197- 220
- Robert, J. (2022b). Primacía de la percepción o apocalipsis científico. En: Bajo el Volcán, 6: 173-196.
- Sicilia, J. (2022). Pensar con los pies. En: Bajo el Volcán, 6: 21-30.
About the Authors
Sylvia Marcos is a thinker committed to indigenous movements in the Americas, a university professor and researcher. A driving force behind revisions in the field of feminist epistemology, Mesoamerican thought and women in indigenous movements, she is also an advocate of anti-hegemonic feminist hermeneutics, theory and practice.
Jean Robert was an activist, thinker and architect who devoted himself to studying and teaching the consequences of modernity on subjective identity through the analysis of means of transport, the notion of 'space' and urbanism.
Carlos Tornel is a Mexican academic, researcher, translator and activist. His work focuses on the decolonisation of concepts such as justice and energy transitions.