In the Moravian town of Zlin in the 1930’s, shoe manufacturer Thomas Bata created the world’s only ever ideal industrial town. The “Czech Shoe-king” took an array of paternalist initiatives from other industrialists (Ford, Taylor, Owen) and developed them further: initiatives like offering free time and sport, influencing living conditions, recruiting staff through internal schooling, and selection according to socio-psychological points of view. The City had ist own Filmproduction, Factorys for Airplanes and developed an unique architectual Style as a corporate Identity. Zlin was a kind of urban laboratory. The tested principle was developed into 37 “Bata Towns” in all continents of the world. The Bata-Principle lived on and continued to work, even after Thomas Bata’s death in a tragic aeroplane crash. ZLIN - the lived Utopia attempts to reconstruct the history of Zlin and the shoe factory, from its golden age in the 1930’s up to the present day. It does this with the help of contemporary witnesses, historians, architects, economists and comprehensive archive material. From the example of Zlin there also emerges a portrait of the beginning of Czech Republic, its destruction under the Nazis, the communist coup, the Velvet Revolution, right up to today’s Czech Republic.