If there was a high point for the radical imagination of a future for the planet, perhaps it was Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon.
Constant was a key member of the Situationist International in its early phase. He started work on New Babylon before he resigned from it, and continued working on it for many years. It embodied many of the situationosts’ key ideas about constructing situations for permanent play, but here imagined at the scale of an infrastructure for a planetery utopia dedicated to nomadic play.
New Babylon Constant built a future out of offcut plexiglass and bicycle spokes. Later he would say that his marvelous models of New Babylon were appreciated in much the same way as African masks were in surrealist times, as interesting forms, but stripped of their magical significance. What is lost from New Babylon is a passion gone from the world, a desire to seize the world itself as the object of desire, to find a Form for the Whole of Life.
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New Babylon, 2015. Versobooks.com. [Accessed 18 January 2023]. post 
As J. Nicholas Entrikin writes this preface, helicopters drone overhead and sirens blare as firefighters work on a nearby hillside to contain a brushfire. They labor to protect my neighborhood and community, and I continue to work at my computer. Fire is not an uncommon occurrence in this natural environment. Except for the individuals fighting the fire and those whose homes are endangered by it, life goes on as usual in the local community, interrupted occasionally by a glance toward the hills.