The utopian horizon in the urban imaginery

from the fruit wealth to the City of Waters

Abstract

This paper discusses the utopian horizon in the urban imagery taking the recent history of the town of Frutal as an object of reflection. In the early years of the 2010 decade, the town located in the western region of the State of Minas Gerais lived an unfulfilled promise: it would become a world reference in research on environmental preservation and water management thanks to the implementation of the City of Waters – a monumental project conceived by state and local political elites. This study assumes that any city may be raised to utopian dimensions, however, as nowadays experienced, promises of the urbe as a politicized living space face supposedly visionary projects, which reduce the cities to goods and the citizens to mere consumers of the urban dramas.