In his 1975 novel Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbach imagined a near future in which a large section of the American west coast, including the states of Washington, Oregon and the northern part of California, had seceded from the United States in order to build a new society, entirely based on principles of ecological stability and long-term human survival. Callenbach’s fictional vision, in many ways, extended the logic and forms of radical urban design experiments that had already been proceeding in Berkeley and other parts of Northern California. What Callenbach observed in the early 1970s were various attempts to generate, sometimes through direct action, an alternative ecological pattern of living that came to be thought of as ‘ecotopian’ but which, I would argue both preceded and extended beyond and after the particular novel of that name. Investigating these reciprocal and intertwining histories of ecotopian urbanism, this paper crosses back and forth between literary imagination and architectural place-making.