Utopies

For several centuries, utopias have nourished the collective imagination. They offer visions capable of surpassing reality and its constraints, in order to imagine futures that inspire enthusiasm.

Exploring other ways of living, sharing, and building

In 2025, the Institut Culturel d’Architecture Wallonie-Bruxelles (ICA), in partnership with the Mundaneum, the Centre d’innovation et Design Grand-Hornu and the CAP Museum of Fine Arts, launched an unprecedented project: to reactivate utopia as a tool for reflection and action for thinking about the contemporary city.

Eight multidisciplinary teams—bringing together architects and artists from the French-speaking Belgian architectural and artistic scene—took up this challenge. Together, they explore how utopia can respond to current and future environmental, social, and spatial challenges.

Through fictions or concrete devices, their proposals explore alternative narratives. Far from fixed ideals or dystopian visions, they articulate forms of cohabitation, political organization or urban making that shift familiar points of reference: floating dwellings, bioclimatic borders, the edible city, resilient plant life, and even evaporation stations.

Echoing Thomas More’s reflections, the projects assembled in this volume seek to anchor themselves in the very real issues of a changing world. They open up possibilities for other ways of dwelling, sharing and building.

Utopies will be offered at the opening receptions of the exhibitions Bâtir des fictions (5/09) and Réparer le monde (27/09), and sold in bookstores for €10.