Almost since humankind was booted from the Garden of Eden, dreamers and visionaries have been imagining or trying to create perfect worlds, whether in Plato's Republic or Thomas More's Utopia, 19th-century socialist experiments or 1960s hippie enclaves. The fall of the Berlin Wall may have given grand visions of the "radiant future" a bad name and science fiction has taken a decided turn for the dystopian in recent decades, but there are still those who dream of an idealized planet -- and they're not just worshippers at the altar of techno-utopianism. From seafaring libertarians to a free-market city-state in the Detroit River, here's a sampling of the future-perfect still pulsing in 2013.
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SimCity's Magnasanti
In the open-ended, alternately maddening and addictive world of SimCity, computer gamers create their own metropolises from scratch, designing systems for zoning, infrastructure, taxation, transportation, leisure, even sewage. But no one has quite mastered the art like Vincent Ocasla, an architecture student in the Philippines who spent nearly four years planning, building, and perfecting Magnasanti, his "optimum population" city of 6 million inhabitants, with "geometry inspired by the [Buddhist] wheel of life and death." And his virtual citizens approve, sort of: With zero congestion, zero water pollution, and zero crime, "they don't rebel or cause revolutions and social chaos," Ocasla told Vice magazine. (He did, however, admit that "they have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved, and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years.") A new version of SimCity has just been released and sold more than 1 million copies in its first two weeks on the market. The game has come a long way since its Atari days in the 1980s, when its rather unassuming working title was "Micropolis."
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