Davina Cooper takes the reader on an amazing journey – from an erotic bathhouse to a private school, Cooper aims to locate utopia in quotidian practice. Utopia, as it is traditionally understood, comes with baggage. For most, utopia connotes a fixed conceptual framework for understanding the emergence of a more perfect modality of living. Utopias are spaces of rainbows and butterflies; they are happy places, where the tyrannical forces of neoliberalism, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, racism, sexism, ageism, classism, etc. have been remedied and cease to exist. Traditionally, utopia is the realised manifestation of praxis – utopia is what radical social change looks like. Cooper problematises this antiquated notion of utopia, instead presenting a refreshing analysis of everyday utopias and their contribution to transformative politics. Ultimately, Cooper claims that utopia is an affective process, wherein the imagining of utopia is actualised in everyday practice. Utopia is not an abstraction – an impossible idea about some far-off place – utopia is a lived experience in which people challenge hegemonic discourses and systematic oppression.

In the first two chapters of the book, Cooper lays out her major theoretical contributions. Again, everyday utopias can be located in what Cooper calls the process of moving from imagination to actualisation. Concepts more broadly, and utopia specifically, are not static things; they are processes (p. 36). For example, from a linguistic standpoint, the concept of utopia has a meaning. One could look this word up in a dictionary and find a definition. However, its meaning to people will vary. Thinking towards everyday utopia requires that we understand that utopia is a fluid concept; how utopia is imagined and actualised – that is, brought about in the material world, outside the world of abstractions – is filled with an infinite number of potentialities. Everyday utopias are experimental; they are innovative and in constant flux. Utopias are not about systematic designs, but about the quotidian practices of individuals. Utopia is not just about a better future; it is about what individuals attempt to actualise in the here and now.

Chapter 3 is the theoretically richest chapter; here the theoretical nuances and complexity of everyday utopia are explored. Everyday utopias are affectual spaces that require what Cooper calls ‘touching’. For example, in the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is at the centre of analysis in this chapter, equality-based political movements require that people are moved – touched by the lives of marginalised others. When people are touched in the context of equality-based movements, people experience utopia. Utopia, then, can certainly be located in a specific objective space (as we will see later), but most important is that utopia is felt. Achieving equality (which is an abstract concept) is not only found in highly organised political action aimed at dismantling structural inequities and systems of domination; achieving equality, and thus the experience of everyday utopia, also must be understood as a mode of living based on the affectual process of being touched.

In Chapter 4, Cooper turns to an intriguing analysis of nudism, where public nudism enacts utopia in the present by embodying radical practices that demonstrate potential, and it also provides a utopian experience for participants. This case-study highlights that everyday utopias might also be understood as utopias in formation; they are nascent pockets where individuals challenge hegemonic power regimes, whether explicitly or implicitly. The experience of everyday utopia is about pushing our sense of reality in the here and now. Nudists quite clearly challenge social mores with regard to what is seen as appropriate embodiment and aesthetics. Nudists challenge a binary distinction between clothed/unclothed bodies – which, as with all binary constructions (gender, sex, sexuality, ability, etc.), is limited in its ability to characterise all modes of being and foster the marginalisation of those bodies that fall outside this binary construction. However, with nudism, its utopian potential is suffocated by its own internal dissentions and problems, namely the racism that plagues its social organisations (an issue I will return to later).

In Chapter 5, Cooper examines a bathhouse called the Toronto Women's and Trans Bathhouse, which was originally called the Pussy Palace. Cooper emphasises feminist care ethics – in this instance, how strangers work arduously to care for one another in a seemingly hedonistic and individually driven place. Everyday utopias create ethical lines that structure this space. In turn, the world that is created is utopic. Ostensibly this is a space that is welcoming to people who do not conform to gender, people of various body sizes, and people with disabilities. Moreover, this space is designed to allow individuals to explore desire in ways that fall outside the neo-Victorian edicts society discursively, and sometimes quite overtly, forces upon us all. What could be more utopian that that? Again, everyday utopias then are not necessarily fixed spaces; one does not live one's entire life at the bathhouse. Moreover, as we learned about nudist organisations, racism and other forms of bigotry did seem to condition access to this utopic bathhouse (again, an issue I will return to shortly).

At this point in the book Cooper makes an interesting move: in Chapters 6 to 8, Cooper turns to case-studies of economies and commerce – topics that are generally situated in right-wing ideologies about laissez-faire markets and the benefits of neoliberal policies. Here, Cooper asks the reader to think about the potential and usefulness of locating utopia in seemingly conservative spaces; indeed, capitalist markets are generally not seen as utopian for the overwhelmingly left-oriented utopian scholarly tradition. Cooper's point is worthwhile for further scholarly pursuit. Seeing the radical potential in an erotic bathhouse is obvious; however, can we find or locate utopia in more seemingly conservative spaces, such as markets? I agree with Cooper that, while operating more covertly, we can in fact locate everyday utopia in conservative spaces.

In Chapter 6, Cooper analyses Local Exchange Trading Schemes (LETS), particularly as they emerged in Britain in the 1990s. Based on research of LETS beginning in 2001, Cooper examines the camaraderie that develops within local exchange communities or bartering networks, where people exchange commodities, services and time with one another as an alternative to capitalist market situations. This fosters individual utopic experiences – as one is encouraged to explore one's talents, desires and likes – such as baking cakes (for food enthusiasts) or walking someone else's dog (for animal lovers). For all participants there exists the potential for a collective utopic experience; in LETS' attempts to circumvent the experience of alienated labour, participants experience a sense of community that feels utopic.

To be clear, their efforts do not succeed in the ways they envision – after all, their network of participants still operates within the domain of the capitalist empire. Cooper reveals that, in this case-study, attempting to combine community labour time and market time was not overly successful; the combination of these temporalities thwarted its overall utopian potential in the long run; however, LETS still created a space for the experience of utopia for individuals. They also demonstrate potential and highlight the unfixed nature of everyday utopia. Again, traditionally utopia requires long travel – great distance – as utopias are located somewhere in a galaxy far, far away; LETS is here now, and is often experienced as a brief escape from capitalist alienation (despite its flaws).

For me, the important distinction here is that everyday utopias are predicated on a perception of a more equal mode of living; they are about how participants feel and experience space – not how effective those spaces are for actually challenging large systems of domination. Cooper's understanding of utopia insists that everyday utopias are about ‘practical actualization’, and how participants experience those attempts at challenging tyrannical forces. Now, this is not to say that outcomes, such as structural reform, are not important, but that the theoretically interesting point is what happens when people try.

In Chapter 7, Cooper analyses the efforts of a private progressive school, Summerhill, located in a small English town. The notoriety of this small school is based on non-compulsory attendance and community rule-making or shared governance. Summerhill's absence of structure and its emphasis on the development of agency amongst children are the features that signal utopia. Cooper utilises this case-study and subsequent analysis to rethink, undo and complicate the concept of property, particularly as it is understood from a neoliberal standpoint. There are in fact other ways of approaching property. Property for traditional theorists of utopia (e.g. the Marxist tradition) is something controlled at the expense of others. Property is reductively reduced to entities that are privately, semi-publicly and/or collectively owned. Instead, Cooper's case-study of Summerhill suggests that property is not just something to be controlled by the elite. Property can also be something people belong to – and thus utopic potential springs forth from this experience of property as belonging – belonging to a community that is in actuality an institution for profit, but yet its organisation creates a space where individuals feel utopia.

In Chapter 8, Cooper examines Speakers' Corner, which is a famous corner in London's Hyde Park. It is known as an objective space for the free exchange of ideas – an idealised public sphere. Cooper suggests that some perceive Speakers' Corner to not function like Jürgen Habermas's normative bourgeois public sphere (who is curiously absent from this discussion). This space rejects the markers of social status that typically grant entry to the bourgeois public sphere; here everyone is ostensibly welcome to speak, and to speak about anything. Cooper notes, in the same vein as Habermas's critics – à la Nancy Fraser – that while idealised for freedom of speech and participation, this public sphere is very much a gendered space: in actuality Speakers' Corner is a patriarchal space. In this unconventional marketplace – a marketplace of ideas – people engage in ‘play’. Speakers' Corner becomes an everyday utopia that draws people away from the humdrum of everyday routine and banality, and into a world of intellectual pleasure. Now, Cooper's analysis does not end here.

As with the rest of the text, Cooper's analysis of play at Speakers' Corner is not just about identifying a space where people find pleasure through exploring creative ways to challenge hegemonic discourses. Her careful analysis also reveals the ways concepts can be re-thought and re-envisioned through an analysis of everyday utopia. Here, Speakers' Corner also assists us in re-thinking what markets are. Markets, as an abstraction, are not just about the buying and selling of commodities: here they can be related to spaces where ideas are exchanged – not for monetary remuneration but for the sensory and affectual experience of taste. At Speakers' Corner people taste new ideas. Markets are rarely seen as spaces for play. Thus Cooper's insights reveal that we might gain a different appreciation and hope for what markets can potentially be.

This book has made a significant contribution to utopian studies. Cooper's conceptualisation of everyday utopias is likely to impact future work across multiple disciplines. In particular, those with an intellectual interest in praxis will likely be drawn to Cooper's emphasis on moving from imagination to actualisation. This book helps us think critically about mapping ideas about equality and better futures onto reality – and the experimental ways these processes are currently manifesting themselves. The powerful promise found in her interesting case-studies is that everyday utopias are innovative quotidian practices that often make what is, or the here and now, more liveable. Utopias are not something we must wait for – we can find them all around us.

An additional strength of this book is its attentiveness to affect. Cooper astutely notes that having a utopian attitude requires moving past seeing concepts as static frameworks: concepts are known, felt and enacted by people. How a particular concept is enacted will vary based on cultural and historical context. Thus my vision of freedom might be quite different from yours, and yours from mine. How we envision, strive for and embody the practices required for actualisation will vary.

Despite the book's overall useful theoretical contributions to utopian studies, I would like to offer three criticisms of the text with relation to: (i) methodology; (ii) treatment of race; and (iii) lack of engagement with queer studies. First, to be clear, this book is the result of years of meticulous research. Each one of Cooper's case-studies is derived from earlier rigorous and methodologically sound qualitative research. Thus my criticism is not about the methodologies utilised in her previous research, but about the methodological choice made here in this book. How and why were these case-studies chosen? They all clearly help to bring life to Cooper's arguments about the presence of everyday utopias in a vast array of social, political and economic spaces. Thus, on the surface, these choices seem ideal. However, if the choice to include these case-studies was the result of a strategic decision regarding convenience sampling, then the author should have explicitly stated this. To my mind, the book would have benefited, particularly by way of the Introduction, from a discussion about the methodological choices regarding the inclusion of these case-studies. Was there some other lynchpin holding them all together? Did Cooper have an additional thought process behind their inclusion in the text?

Second, the treatment of race throughout the text is problematic. I would ask Cooper: How do you reconcile the documented racism in nudist circles or queer bathhouses with utopia? To be clear, Cooper does make clear that these problems assuage the overall potential of utopia within these spaces. However, while Cooper's treatment of these issues received meticulous thought in the previously published studies from which the case-studies were drawn, the treatment and analysis of race within the case-studies presented in the book was underdeveloped. Thus more attentive racial analysis as a complication within everyday utopias would have strengthened these chapters.

Finally, Cooper's lack of engagement with queer studies, particularly its significant contribution to utopian studies, was disappointing. While there are clearly moments where Cooper gestures toward the insights of queer theory, the book does not meaningfully engage with queer studies. I will provide a few examples in which Cooper's (albeit successful) analysis would have been fortified by further incorporation of the queer studies literature. Broadly, given Cooper's emphasis on a fluid understanding of concepts, a more thorough interaction with queer theory – and its emphasis on anti-categorical thinking, anti-essentialism and the rejection of binaries – would have contributed to Cooper's theorising around concepts. Additionally, the process of moving from imagination to actualisation is what José Esteban Muñoz (whom Cooper does cite very minimally) called ‘queer-world making’ in his groundbreaking (2009) book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Further engagement with Muñoz in particular, but also the additional literature that followed, would have strengthened Cooper's analysis of the potentiality of everyday utopia.

In another instance, a major strength of Cooper's arguments is her acknowledgement of failure. Traditionally, utopia hinges upon the success of subaltern groups articulating demands, engaging in subversion and practically building (often through revolution) the predetermined utopia strategically planned for. Again, traditionally, utopia is what happens when political agents succeed. From Cooper we learn that everyday utopias do not require success. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The process by which individuals challenge hegemonic discourses and various tyrannical forces in everyday life is marred by failure. In fact, this is one of Cooper's most worthwhile arguments:

To think about everyday utopia as a product of failure, and not just of success, is a worthwhile intellectual adventure. Jack Halberstam's (Reference Halberstam2011) book The Queer Art of Failure takes up this very issue. Thus, again, the absence of queer studies literature represents a missed opportunity in Cooper's book. Despite the minor criticisms provided here, the book has surely made important contributions to utopian studies. Cooper's analysis is thoughtful and meticulous. This is a well-written book that will likely join the bookshelves of many utopian hopefuls.