"A map of the world that does not include Utopia,” Oscar Wilde once said,  “is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail".

This week, Ideas talks to three explorers on the search for Utopia – Professor Eric Olin Wright, the president of the American Sociological Society and author of Envisioning Real Utopias; Professor Lyman Tower Sargent, one of the world’s leading scholars of utopian projects and co-author of Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities; and John Milne, a 17-year veteran of the Ahu Ahu ohu, a state-sponsored commune on the Whanganui River.