4 ideas
Zanzalá is a city in the Brazilian future built at the foot of the Serra do Mar, the coastal escarpment between São Paulo's plateau and the Atlantic. It serves as a concrete case of a just society sited in a real, recognizable Brazilian landscape rather than on an invented island.
The novel treats how a city powers itself as a moral choice. Wind is free, local and impossible to hoard, so an economy built on it removes the extraction, smoke and fuel monopolies that feed domination. Clean power is shown as a precondition for an egalitarian order, not a technical side feature.
The book makes vegetarianism a sign of how far a society has moved past violence. A people who have given up killing animals for food are presented as having also given up the habits that justify killing people. Read this way, what a society eats shows how much violence it accepts as normal.
Zanzalá's ideal society is kind, modest and close to nature rather than a rigid, centrally planned system. Its goodness comes from cleanliness, sufficiency and mutual regard, not from total control or technological spectacle.