Um, that's a little condescending.

Apologies.

Of course Anarres doesn't feel like its own world, it deliberately reacted against the situation on Urras. Both worlds were shown in negative and positive lights(on the side of Anarres the stagnation and encroachment of bureaucratic power structures are the big negatives). The message isn't that consumerism is bad, it's that the Pravic language has this deep interplay with Anarres' culture to the point that Shevek doesn't understand the basic cultural underpinnings of a market. Shevek is playing the literary part of 'the traveler'.

The misuse of linearity (or perhaps, the subversion of it) in the actual narration require one think deeply about one's conception of time which is of course an underlying theme in Shevek's work. In fact one could argue that the novel is a reproduction of Shevek's theory.

There's also the question of whether either 'utopia' could exist in the conditions found on the other planet. The anarchic socialism on Anarres works only because of the lack of resources. They're not just dispossessed by political choice, but also by the very environment they call home. And the implication is that the natural wealth of Urras shapes culture in a very different direction, bolstered by the concepts it embodies in its language.