PHX JAX: A Springfield Protopia
Phoenix Arts & Innovation District
By Sherry Magill
The Road to Utopia runs through Jacksonville. Not the 1945 comedy featuring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, but rather a 2024 documentary film featuring the repurposing of Springfield Warehouse District into a regenerative community. This Road to Utopia is found on Food Matters TV via Prime Video and highlights the Phoenix Arts & Innovation District (PHX JAX), south Florida developer Tony Cho’s Jacksonville dream and prototypical demonstration project.
A native of a small Florida east coast town named Sebastian, Cho is CEO of Future of Cities and counts Miami’s Wynwood Art District and Magic City Innovation District—Little Haiti, among his development successes. In once thriving and now abandoned historic places and buildings, Cho sees what too few see: opportunity.
Repurposing Springfield’s warehouse district requires community-building on the front end and is financially challenging says Cho, more expensive than new development but ultimately more rewarding.
It’s not for every developer, sadly.
Protopia
Cho speaks passionately about a place he calls protopia.
A recently made-up word, protopia is so new that our friends at Merriam-Webster do not recognize it. But they do recognize utopia, a 1516 word invented by Sir Thomas More and translated to mean no-place, a fictionalized perfect society More imagined where folks would live with one another in absolute harmony.
Unattainable.
Not true for protopia. Like utopia, the word protopia is made up, invented in this new century and whose exact definition is evolving. Nonetheless, protopia points to a promising human future. Not utopia, a no-place, and not dystopia, where people live “wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives.”
Protopia. Pro-place. Pro-community. Pro-human.
