abtopia

a place whose primary and defining quality is that of not being somewhere else.

"Unlike the stratified city the suburb was composed of segregated homogenous communities. It was a spatial illusion of equality, with the continuous grain and exclusiveness that the disrupted urban condition was failing to supply...it offered none of the rural attributes of self-sufficiency or open land or the unification of work and home. It could neither make sense on its own nor be a continuous part of something else. Instead it was the product of a series of denials - a movement away without moving toward. The dreaminess from which it stemmed did not produce a specific alternative. Rather it created something neither city nor country; but a place none the less, and one defined by the act of trying to get away. It was the creation of an abtopia."


From "The Chinese Dream: a society under construction"