The Top 40

Missed Greeley, Colorado. The city still exists, just not as the egalitarian commune it was intended to be. The commune failed after a few years because some people noticed that others were riding on the fruits of their labors. They didn't care for unequal effort with equal division of the crops. The majority opted for a change toward free market standards.

One of the socialist founders, Nathan Meeker, went on, as a government Indian Agent, to try to establish a utopian community among the White River Utes. The Utes didn't take to using their fine horses for plowing nor did they appreciate plowing up their grazing lands. That utopian dream was concluded by what is known as the Meeker Massacre. Meeker lost his life, the Utes lost their reservation lands in Colorado.

Utopias seem so wonderful and promise much. They never deliver.

They also forgot Walt Disney's EPCOT. Yeah, maybe it's successful in that it makes a lot of money attracting tourists, but supposedly Walt envisioned it as some kind of city-of-the-future where people did real work and lived real lives. AFAIK, that part never took off.

Jackson Browne wrote a song about Arcosanti. It is pretty stupid, but it was the early 70s and everybody was stoned:

"Before The Deluge"

Some of them were dreamers
And some of them were fools
Who were making plans and thinking of the future
With the energy of the innocent
They were gathering the tools
They would need to make their journey back to nature
While the sand slipped through the opening
And their hands reached for the golden ring
With their hearts they turned to each other’s heart for refuge
In the troubled years that came before the deluge

Some of them knew pleasure
And some of them knew pain
And for some of them it was only the moment that mattered
And on the brave and crazy wings of youth
They went flying around in the rain
And their feathers once so fine grew torn and tattered
And in the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings
And exchanged love’s bright and fragile glow for the glitter and the rouge
And in the moment they were swept before the deluge

Now let the music keep our spirits high
And let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal its secrets by and by
When the light that’s lost within us reaches the sky

Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived
And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge
Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge

Now let the music keep our spirits high
And let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal its secrets by and by
When the light that’s lost within us reaches the sky

http://www.jacksonbrowne.com/discography/1974-late-for-the-sky/lyrics/#song8