Failure is often perceived as negative, destructive, and demoralising to all things utopian. Indeed, charges of failure routinely confront utopian experiments in living. But whilst failure is a key part of utopian thinking and projects, we still lack a sufficiently nuanced and focused account of its different purposes and affordances. This introduction highlights how the Special Issue on Utopia and Failure addresses this lacuna by interrogating three overarching research questions: To what extent have utopias provided imagined spaces of escape from failure – for individuals and groups – by offering alternatives to the success/failure dyad of competitive mainstream society? How is the propensity for failure incorporated, deliberately or unintentionally, into different utopian projects, from social experiments to the built environment? In what ways may we think differently about failure, by engaging with various utopian practices, ambitions and projects from the past and the present? This Special Issue is an outcome of the AHRC-funded Utopia and Failure network, that hosted four events between 2023 and 2026. In addition to introducing the papers, this introduction discusses the everyday work of these workshops and their creation of temporary utopian communities of academic practice.
Thaler et al. (Tue,) studied this question.