Imagining Urban Futures. Carl Abbott
King Arthur’s round table. A decade later, Le Corbusier sketched a similar sort of linear industrial city (without acknowledging any predecessors).5
The idea resurfaced in the United States after World War II as automobiles began to draw tightly centered downtowns outward along highway corridors. Journalist Christopher Rand in 1965 suggested that Los Angeles had a spine rather than a heart, commenting that the Wilshire-Sunset axis rather than downtown functioned as the urban core. He was channeling architect Richard Neutra, who soon after arriving in Los Angeles from Europe sketched “Rush City Reframed,” consisting of traffic corridors lined with slab high-rises—quite like the unfortunate Robert Taylor Homes that would march alongside Chicago’s Dan Ryan Expressway from 1962 to 2007. The thought experiments have kept on coming, such as the Jersey Corridor Project of Princeton University architecture professors Michael Graves and Peter Eisenman, proposed in 1965 at the start of their high-profile careers. Living in what was beginning to emerge as the Princeton area Edge City, they suggested bowing to the inevitable by connecting Trenton to New Brunswick with two parallel megastructures sandwiching and surrounded by strips of green, since “a linear city is the city of the twentieth century.”6
The urban ordinary is a pervasive foundation through Heinlein’s work in the 1940s and 1950s. The protagonists in “The Roads Must Roll” stop for a meal at Jake’s Steakhouse No. 4, which comes complete with crusty proprietress and two-inch slabs of beef. In The Door into Summer, written in 1956, he projected protagonist Daniel Boone Davis thirty years into his future from 1970 to 2000. Because Heinlein’s interest was time travel paradoxes, he depicted a Los Angeles that still worked pretty much the same as the twentieth-century city, but with some new laws and customs. In Double Star (1956), guests in the Hotel Eisenhower do indeed use bounce tubes rather than elevators, but the hotel rooms are numbered by floors, just like twentieth-century hotel rooms.
The urban ordinary is also a powerful presence in films set on near-future Earth and Earthlike places, where the “shinier” parts of the contemporary cityscape stand in for cities to come. Jean-Luc Godard used the high-rise towers of the brand-new La Défense district of Paris to represent an extraterrestrial city in Alphaville (1965). Office buildings and shopping malls in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, are the 2054 future in Minority Report (2002). Contemporary Los Angeles plays the role of future cities in In Time (2011), and LA and Irvine office buildings stand in for the mid-twenty-first century in Demolition Man (1993). In Total Recall (1990), portions of Mexico City do duty as a city of 2084.
These cinematic choices show the lasting cultural resonance of the art moderne and streamlined styles of the mid-twentieth century. Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition in 1933 and the New York World’s Fair of 1939 used similar architectural rhetoric to signify progress during the troubled times of the Great Depression. In the midst of postwar prosperity, the organizers of the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle in 1962 made the same choices—the Space Needle is a kissing cousin of New York’s Trylon and Perisphere. The aesthetic road took one fork to the glistening aluminum-and-glass skyscrapers of the 1950s and 1960s, another to the exuberant atomic age / space age “googie” architecture of motels, bowling alleys, and drive-in restaurants. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Oral Roberts University campus from the 1960s echoes the cardboard Buzz Corey spaceport that I assembled on my bedroom floor in 1952.
The ability of the sleek side of twentieth-century design to represent the future has an uncomfortable implication. Embedded is an unspoken assumption that cities aren’t changing all that much or that fast. The last two generations, suggest several observers, have seen few innovations that have fundamentally changed the character of urban areas. Tyler Cowan has called it “the great stagnation,” Peter Thiel has complained about “the end of the future,” and Neal Stephenson about “innovation starvation.”7 Urban areas changed drastically from 1840 to 1940, but perhaps not so much since then. Most adults in the 2010s could be transported back to the 1940s and still get along—at least if their dads had made sure they learned how to drive a stick shift. Elevators no longer need operators for the mind-numbing work of opening doors and calling the floors, but they are still elevators. Traffic lights still cycle back and forth between red and green. I write on a two-year-old laptop, but I charge it with electricity from Columbia River dams and transmission lines that predate World War II. Even implementation of “big data” to create “smart cities” is being applied to old functions like better traffic-light cycles and more efficient siting of firehouses.
Jean-Luc Godard shot the science fiction film Alphaville in the modern buildings of Paris, but the advertising poster placed the main characters in front of a much more futuristic skyline. This is one of the most common designs for science fiction book covers and film advertising, used in movies as different as Metropolis and Logan’s Run. Courtesy Janus Films/Photofest © Janus Films.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment of expectations has involved the impacts of electronic communication. The advent of personal computing and Internet connections in the 1980s spurred great expectations for urban decentralization. Soon, proclaimed the enthusiasts, crowded cities would be obsolete. Production workers would operate machinery by remote control, and professional workers would relocate to their favorite seacoast, mountain valley, or small town. Well, a bit of that has happened: radiologists can read X-ray results at a distance, college students can win big bucks with online poker, and soldiers can operate drones from consoles an ocean and continent away from their West Asian targets. Nevertheless, cities have continued to grow in both developed and developing nations. Superabundant flows of information turn out to favor greater centralization of decision making because on-site managers are less essential. The result has been the solidification of a global urban hierarchy topped by what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls global cities—New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, and their ilk. Meanwhile, the centers of many old industrial cities like Birmingham (UK) or Chicago look just as good as or better than they did fifty years ago with the benefit of changing generational tastes and massive reinvestment.
SKYSCRAPER CITY
If real cities haven’t lived up to techno-hype, the science fiction fixation on the sleekest of cityscapes to signal the future raises an interesting question about the technological city. The visual choices of film designers suggest, by and large, that the future will be not only shiny but also tall, a place where glass-and-steel towers frame urban airways through which the aircars weave. This is an imaginative leap, for cities over many millennia were far wider than they were high. Limited to five or six stories by construction technologies and the willingness of people to trudge up stairs, they draped over the landscape like slightly lumpy pancakes. Over the last 150 years, cities have been rethought and sometimes rebuilt in ways that prioritize height over breadth. Indeed, the vertical city of the real twenty-first century—Hong Kong, New York, Shanghai, Dubai—is itself a radical reimagining of traditional cities. In turn, science fiction has taken skyscraper districts as the most common jump-off for even bigger, higher, and denser cities of the future. For one example take Bruce Sterling’s description of future Singapore in Islands in the Net (1988): “Nightmarishly vast spires whose bulging foundations covered whole city blocks…. Storey after storey rose silent and dreamlike, buildings so unspeakably huge that they lost all sense of weight; they hung above the earth like Euclidean thunderheads, their summits lost in sheets of steel-gray rain” (215).
The mechanically powered safety elevator, thanks to Mr. Otis, is one of the two great transportation inventions from the century of steam, along with track-and-vehicle combinations like railroads and streetcars. Combined with the development of steel-frame building construction, the elevator gave Paris the Eiffel Tower and New York and Chicago the first skyscrapers, helping to make the towering office building a visual clue and then cliché for visualizing the future.
The change was not instantaneous. It took time for an aesthetic keyed to seeing magnificence and power in great horizontally spread buildings to transform into the admiration of the vertical. In the nineteenth century, architects designed and developers filled new downtowns with “business blocks.” Four- to six-story cubes and oblongs, they were meant to impress with their solidity. The best