Utopia Had Canals. We Have the 485.

Lucas Ferreira Gandara Cabral e João Paulo Severo

The Subway of Fundão — A dialogue in the manner of Thomas More

It was a particularly hot April morning in 2026 in Rio de Janeiro. On Ilha do Fundão, the campus of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Professor Lucy Good Villages was hurrying between the bus stop and the Faculty of Letters, carrying a battered copy of Thomas More’s Utopia. That same morning, for reasons no one could quite explain, perhaps an early campaign move, perhaps genuine academic curiosity, Mayor Edward Peace was paying a visit to the campus. The two met under the meager shade of a tree beside the Technology Center.

Lucy: Mayor! What a surprise to find you here. You came by car, I imagine? Because if you had tried to come by public transport, you’d still be stuck somewhere along Avenida Brasil.

Edward: Professor Good Villages! Actually, I came by helicopter. But that’s because a public official’s time is precious, it’s not a lack of faith in Rio’s transport system, no.

Lucy: Faith! Now there’s a fitting word. Because to get to Fundão by bus, what is required is not planning, it is faith. Faith that the 485 will show up. Faith that the BRT won’t break down in the middle of the Transcarioca corridor. Faith that the traffic jam on the Linha Vermelha expressway will, by some miracle, dissolve. Thomas More, when he described the island of Utopia, at least endowed it with good bridges and canals. We, who live on a real island, don’t even have a subway.

Edward: You compare me to the rulers of Utopia? I’m flattered. But look: More invented an island. I govern a real city, with a real budget, with real geology. Do you know how much it costs to bore a tunnel under Guanabara Bay? We’re talking billions. Bil-lions. With a B as in BRT, which, by the way, works quite well.

Lucy: Works well? Have you ever ridden the BRT at seven in the morning, Mayor? Because I do. And I can assure you that the experience is closer to the fifth circle of Dante’s Inferno than to any utopia. More, incidentally, was very clear about this: a well-ordered society ensures that its citizens can move freely. The Utopians had a system in which anyone could travel at will, needing only the prince’s permission. We, to travel from Fundão to downtown, need divine permission.

Edward: But you are comparing fiction with reality, with all due respect. More could draw canals wherever he pleased, it was ink on paper. I deal with public tenders, environmental impact studies, expropriations, and with a soil that, in the case of Ilha do Fundão, is landfill. Landfill! Do you know what happens when you try to dig a subway through landfill? It’s like trying to build a cathedral on top of a cornbread cake.

Lucy: And yet Amsterdam is a swamp and has a subway. Tokyo was destroyed twice and has a metro network that would make More weep with envy. The problem, Mayor, is not geology. It is political will.

Edward: Political will! That’s the magic phrase, isn’t it? Whenever someone doesn’t want to deal with the technical complexity of a problem, they say there’s a lack of political will. But tell me, Professor: if you had, say, fifteen billion reais, would you invest it in a subway line that mainly serves a university, or would you expand the system to the West Zone, where three million people live without a single rail?

Lucy: Ah, but that is a false dichotomy, and you know it. Fundão is not just a university. It is a research hub, a Technology Park, hospitals, institutes. Seventy thousand people pass through it every day. And a subway line to Fundão doesn’t have to end at Fundão, it could continue to Ilha do Governador, to Duque de Caxias. A subway is not a point; it is a network.

Lucy: And that is precisely why More is relevant. He wrote Utopia at a time when England was drowning in real problems, enclosures, poverty, brutal punishments. He did not propose Utopia as an engineering blueprint. He proposed it as a horizon, as a provocation. The question is not whether we can build the subway tomorrow. The question is: why do we accept that one of the largest universities in the country should be so inaccessible?

Edward: Because Rio de Janeiro is a city of tragic choices, Professor. Every real that goes one way doesn’t go another. More was a man of his time, and he knew that Utopia was, in part, a joke, the very name says it: no place. Could it be that asking for a subway to Fundão is, in a sense, embracing a name that already says it all? Fund-ão. The bottom. The depths. The place no one looks at.

Lucy: And that is exactly what I contest. Fundão doesn’t have to be the bottom of anything. But it will remain so as long as the government treats mobility as a luxury and not as a right. Article six of the Constitution, Mayor, are you familiar with it?

Edward: Transportation as a social right, I know, I know. But the Constitution also guarantees health, education, and housing, and you know the state of those things. It’s not cynicism, it’s realism. To govern is to manage scarcity.

Lucy: And that is exactly the kind of talk that More put in the mouths of the king’s advisors, the ones who argued that nothing could change because conditions wouldn’t allow it. Hythloday disagreed. He said that one must at least present the idea, so that the seed might be planted. Very well, Mayor: consider this conversation a seed.

Edward: A seed. All right. But know that seeds don’t germinate very well in the landfill soil of Fundão. They need investment, irrigation, maintenance…

Lucy: They need someone who will stop making excuses.

Edward: They need someone who understands public budgets.

At that point, one of the mayor’s aides approached to remind him of a bike lane inauguration in Copacabana. The helicopter was already waiting. Edward Peace shook the professor’s hand with a diplomatic smile, while Lucy Good Villages reopened her copy of Utopia, searching for some argument she had not yet used, for the next time. No conclusion was reached. But the conversation, like every good utopian conversation, left an uncomfortable question lingering in the air: if we know what the ideal would be, why do we insist on calling it impossible?

REFERENCES

MORE, Thomas. Utopia. Edited by Edward Surtz. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1964. (Selected Works of St. Thomas More).