At the heart of this imagined future (circa 2045) is a strong belief that how we communicate with one another is “fateful”: it has consequences for what happens next, opening up new possibilities while simultaneously closing off other possibilities. We “make” both the present and the future of our social worlds together, one conversation at a time. In Cosmopolis and other like-minded communities, the manner and modes in which people communicate matter as much, if not more, than the content of what they happen to say. And this way of being has an enduring impact on the quality of our collective lives and our personal happiness.

For Cosmopolites, communication is more than a process of exchanging information or ideas; it is a highly dynamic social manufacturing process in which the “products” being made together include relationships, personal identities, family values and traditions, communities, institutions, forms of government, cultures and subcultures, and other ways of being. Like the early 21st century “maker movements” in design and technology, the most mundane of technologies, everyday human interaction, came to be seen as truly fundamental to people-making and community-making.

The Cosmopolis 2045 website chronicles, in story form, a forty-plus year transformation from a typical suburban community known as West Wiggington to a fledgling aspiration renamed Cosmopolis in 2017, to the much more fully embodied community you will see depicted here in the year 2045. The personal stories told by founding members such as Ruth Rodriguez, Tom Evans, Justine Jones, and Therese Garcia, among others, shows how this transformation took place. The transformation is also captured by architect Ralph Ellington who led the re-design of the community to foster greater social interaction and a more sustainable environmental footprint.

Everyday life in Cosmopolis is animated around the collective desire to always engage in “making better social worlds.” Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the story of Judge Anna Day, about how residents reinvented the local justice system to be a relationally and community-based social justice enterprise. You’ll also read stories from present-day (2045) residents of Cosmopolis, such as teenager Josh Henderson and his parents describing how the community’s everyday social practices remind and inspire them to be better versions of themselves, especially when our all-too human weaknesses bring out the worst in us.

These, and many others, are the stories of Cosmopolis. We hope they help us all respond to Barnett’s Pearce’s challenge that “If we want to have a better social world, we will have to make it.”