What is
the
Akron area Eutopia Report?
The mission of the Akron area Eutopia Report is to
seek out, bring to light,
measure, and track
the people, processes,
trends, activities,
and events that build
Good
Places in our area
so that together we can
join and strengthen them.
The real change must take
place in our hearts. |
What's in a Name?
What do we mean by “a Good Place”?
In 1516 Sir Thomas More published a story describing his vision of an ideal society.
Believing it could not exist he named his imaginary society “Utopia.” In Greek “U” (“ou”, actually) is the prefix for “not” or “no” and “topia” represents the Greek root for “place.” Therefore Utopia literally means “No-place.” It doesn’t, and probably could not, exist.
Since then we have come to call other visions of ideal living conditions “utopias,” often forgetting that the name refers to an impossible place.
We will never be able to compile a comprehensive, complete description of a perfect place that everyone everywhere would agree with at all times. So we won’t try.
While we can’t make our places “perfect,” we can work to make our places “good.” In Greek, “Eu” is the prefix for “good.” So we combine “Eu” for good with “topia” for place to produce another word - Eutopia: a Good Place.
It is better to have a pretty good, fairly comprehensive description of a good place that many of us work toward than to have no overall vision.
Our description of a good place will change over time as our understanding and our environment change. For now, here is our description of . . . a Good Place.
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