Utopia (1516) by the English humanist Thomas More is a Latin work of political philosophy describing a fictional island commonwealth visited by the traveller Raphael Hythloday. Its fifty-four towns are nearly identical and carefully planned, with broad streets, communal ownership of goods, no private property, and houses fronted by shared gardens that residents rotate between. The book uses this imagined society to satirise and critique the inequalities of contemporary Europe. The name More coined, from Greek for no-place, gave the genre its label.
It founded the modern tradition of the planned ideal city and the utopian critique of existing society through spatial reform. That lineage runs forward through nineteenth-century model communities and the garden city movement to twentieth-century new towns and present-day eco-towns.