Utopia is published today and available for purchase. The book is the result of three years of work within the Roskilde Festival Group and brings together research, experiences, artistic contributions, and analyses of how young people today relate to the future, to community, and to the possibility of change.
In a time marked by climate crisis, war, declining wellbeing, and political polarization, the book poses a simple yet crucial question. How do we keep the future open?
Why work with utopia?
The work with Utopia grew out of a realization within the Roskilde Festival Group: that many of the challenges we face are not only technical or political, but also imaginative. When the future is experienced as closed or overwhelming, it becomes harder to engage, to act, and to believe that change is possible.
This is why we chose to turn our attention to utopia. Not as a finished model of the perfect society, but as the capacity to imagine that the world could be different. Utopia became a space of inquiry, where we wanted to explore what happens when young people are given room to dream, create, experiment, and fail together. The festival was used as a laboratory ¬- a temporary society where other ways of being together can be tested, felt in the body, and shared collectively.
Over the three years, we have, among other things, in collaboration with Ungdomsbureauet and Dagbogsskolen, handed out disposable cameras to young participants at the festival and invited them to document the moments, places, and situations that, for them, held something special, meaningful, or hopeful.
The photographs are not intended as documentation in the classical sense, but as visual testimonies to the utopian impulses that emerge in the midst of everyday life. This is why they also play a central role in this book, where they are used both as independent narratives and as co-creative material in developing an understanding of young people’s dreams, hopes, and imagination.
One of the book’s central insights is that utopia has not disappeared, but has changed form. For many young people today, dreams of the future rarely revolve around grand revolutions or all-encompassing system changes. Instead, utopian impulses emerge in the near and the concrete - in communities, in care, in small actions, and in the experiments of everyday life.
Utopia shows how young people navigate a complex world with both realism and hope. They are often pragmatic and acutely aware of limitations and crises, yet far from apathetic. On the contrary, the book points to how many young people seek change from within: through relationships, responsibility, local actions, and new ways of being together.
The book also illustrates how art, activism, and co-creation can open new spaces for the imagination. When people are invited to participate, to sense, and to act, small shifts emerge in how the world is experienced. This is where utopia takes root. Not as a distant horizon, but as something that can be felt and lived here and now.
As part of the project, in collaboration with Den Grønne Ungdomsbevægelse, we invited young people to actively visualize their own ideas of the future. Participants were given the opportunity to translate hopes, concerns, and dreams into images, colors, and tangible expressions.
The works show how utopias can take shape when the imagination is given space in the hands and in the body.
Utopia is not a book with ready-made answers or simple solutions. It is a collage of voices, experiences, and perspectives that together point to something essential. That hope is not naïve optimism, but something that can be built through practice, community, and action.
The book is aimed at anyone working with young people, culture, democracy, sustainability, and social change. And at anyone concerned with how we can strengthen our shared ability to imagine a different future.
If you are curious about how hope can take shape in practice, and how small actions can hold far-reaching perspectives, the book is an invitation to read along, and to take part in keeping the future open.
Utopia is published in collaboration with the publisher Økotopia and can be purchased here.
