Stuck With the Visions

At last week’s Lift workshop on the The Design of the Hybrid City of the Near Future (more on that later…), I was surprised how much many participants really wanted to depict the visions of future cities (already studied 2 years ago) and then acted less engaged in dissecting the implications (e.g. the winners and losers, what if it goes wrong, what do we need to go right). There is a real fascination for these visions and I acknowledge that they are useful to maintain consistent progress towards betterment, but if we do not make an extra effort to consider their meanings, we are stuck in a) reflecting on our own visions of the future of the city b) fail to acknowledge the implications behind the improvements and their complexity. Without this exercise it seems that we keep on carrying the visions of the efficiently-built fabric, such as New Songdo or the Venus Project (video), where the city is built from scratch, optimized for non-human variables such as transportation efficiency and separated land use (e.g. EPCOT – video), away from distracting and messy people, very much in the 50s and 60s urban renewal fashion. We know how that turned out great! I am still wondering, how much has been learned from Jane Jacobs since then?

The designing the future video, a contemporary vision of an urban future free from distracting and messy people, by Jacque Fresco