4 ideas
A man falls asleep and wakes a hundred years later, in the year 2000, then tours São Paulo, which has grown into an orderly, hygienic city of 1.5 million people. This premise is a concrete, locally set case of the utopian tour: the future is shown by walking a visitor from the past through one specific city, not described in the abstract.
A narrator who skips a century carries the present's assumptions intact into the future, so every improvement registers as a contrast. The reader sees reform through the eyes of someone who remembers the old conditions, and that turns an imagined society into an implicit critique of the one the reader lives in.
By making cleanliness and order the defining traits of the future city, the novel treats sanitation, public health and physical order as the visible index of social progress. Seen through this lens, a city's health infrastructure is not a technical detail. It is the main evidence of whether a society has advanced.
Setting a borrowed utopian template in São Paulo implies that a reformed future can be imagined by placing a foreign reform model in a specific local city. The method grounds an abstract ideal in familiar streets and scale. The imagined 1.5 million inhabitants make the vision read as an achievable municipal target rather than a distant fantasy.