The design of a community is a potentially contentious subject, as different people have different ideas of what constitutes a utopia.

However a community is designed, a functional community must physically evolve to exist, just as cities are not so much a planned arrangement of structure as they are an emergent phenomenon, created by a convergence of individual interests. A city's form is a physical manifestation of environmental constraints and a collective social construct that almost always changes. The physical design influences the social construct and vice versa.