Building a paradise on Earth has been the desire of many thinkers throughout history. We propose you take a tour of some of the most striking utopias that were developed and find out what they proposed in relation to work, goods and the link with the geographical environment. A society in which everyone has the same opportunities, where no one is poor and where work leaves time for leisure. This has been the dream of many people throughout humanity. Some of them have gone further and tried to capture what would be the characteristics that this ideal organization would have. The first time the term utopia was used was in the 16th century. The English thinker Thomas More published his work Utopia in 1516, in which he describes an ideal society, where the common good is privileged and people live in harmony. Utopia, for starters, is an island made up of 54 cities, each with land available for farming and working. Several centuries before Karl Marx, he proposed the elimination of private property and a common organization of work and activities. The working day is only six hours for everyone. According to Moro, this would be enough, since people who did not work at that time would also have to work, such as landowners, religious or women. People who were engaged in activities that no longer exist in Utopia, such as those linked to financial activities, should also be included. Planning is extensive in Utopia: clothing and land distribution are the same for everyone. In the cultivation of the land all the inhabitants take part according to their family. Also, they rotate in turns. It is expected that everyone will live a certain time both in the countryside and in the city. There are also no lawyers. This is striking, since Moro himself was a lawyer. But since there are a few laws, everyone knows them and can defend themselves. According to the thinker, by abolishing private property and financial profit, the causes of the ills of society and disputes are also eliminated. This work gave name to a literary genre, utopias. But there are earlier cases of descriptions of ideal cities. Like Plato's Republic. These works of fiction have some features in common. For example, they usually characterize remote places, either in the territory or in time. They are evaluative, since what is desirable is defined. And also critics, since they are compared with the context in which the author writes. Etymologically, utopia means no place. That is, it would be an imaginary place, which could not exist in practice. But utopias also sometimes seek to show a place to which one wants to go and call for action. Already in the 20th century, Robert Nozick wrote Anarchy, State and Utopia, a text in which he reflects on the way we organize ourselves in society. According to his vision, there is no possible justification for the existence of a State that encompasses more functions than the minimum: that is, that protects individual freedoms. This author inspired currents that continue to this day, such as libertarians or anarcho-capitalists. On the other side of the ideological spectrum we find a socialist utopia, Looking Backward. It was written by Edward Bellamy and generated a great repercussion at the end of the 19th century. There he describes what the year 2000 would be like from the point of view of more than a century before. In this case, there are no inequalities or deficiencies, since all the distribution of resources is similar and is determined by the State, owner of all the properties. There is no inheritance because, of course, the State is the sole owner of the land. This world created by Bellamy, in which no one dies of hunger and nothing escapes state planning, inspired many thinkers and even led to the creation of a political party. A few years later, the world witnessed the attempt to put a utopia into practice. The Russian Revolution sought to implement ideas proposed by Marx several decades earlier. However, many of these ideas were intended for urban societies, not for the peasant Russia of those years. It is that, many times, utopian ideas are thought without taking into account the particularities of each region. What is the geographical situation of a country, what raw materials does it have, what is the climate like, with what other states does it trade or what foods can be grown are some of the variables that cannot be left out when thinking about a development plan for a society. It is also key to understand what it is that you want to modify. In this sense, one of the few utopias that were written in Latin America can be rescued. The Argentine politician Domingo Sarmiento, who would later become president, published a work called Argirópolis in 1850. There he seeks to solve a problem in Argentina at that time, which had not resolved the issue of its capital city. Sarmiento proposes the creation of the Federated States of the Río de la Plata. There, in addition to Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay would be included under the same government on an equal footing among all. His idea was to create a nation that could face Brazil, much larger and more populous. In those years, the port cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo vied for dominance in international trade. Sarmiento proposed a novel idea: that the capital of the new state be Argirópolis. It would be located on Isla Martín García, which is in the middle of the Río de la Plata, which to this day divides Argentina from Uruguay. With the installation of the capital on an island, all the other provinces would remain under the same conditions and none would prevail over the other. In addition, the free navigation of the rivers would be ensured and the merchandise would circulate without problems to Paraguay. Sarmiento's inspiration was the United States, which to resolve the question of its capital created Washington DC, a city that was not tied to the fate of any member state of the union. The Argentine thinker was confident that the union of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay could create a stronger international power, in line with the thinking of the time. In fact, he cites the cases of India and Italy, which during those years were fighting for the creation of a nation. History, as we know, did not lead to the creation of the Federated States of the Río de la Plata. What would that country have been like? What characteristics would it have to this day? Leave your comment below. 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