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How Will We Live in 2010?
Metropolis predicts the city of the near future.
By Karen E. Steen
January 2004
Forget the flying car, the personal jet pack, the bubble condo on the Moon.
It's not going to happen--not for the vast majority of us, anyway. Here's what
is going to happen--what's already happening--in controlled design experiments
around the world. Trains are becoming a lot faster. Information technology is
telling us more about where we are and what's happening around us. Skyscrapers
are getting crazier looking. Green technology is making places cleaner and
healthier. Builders of monolithic structures are figuring out that their
designs need to be flexible, that today's forward-looking design is tomorrow's
aesthetic hangover. The city of the near future is closer than you think.
With this issue we are not so much predicting the world to come as previewing
it. Many of the projects on these pages are already nearing completion. Even
the speculative designs we've commissioned are based on current ideas and
existing technologies. Though we're enthusiastic about these possibilities, we
realize that the buoyantly optimistic days of World's Fair futurism are over.
The public is harder to impress--and some of the most advanced technologies are
more cause for alarm than for celebration. Accordingly we've sprinkled this
issue with facts on the future that are stranger--and sometimes scarier--than
fiction. And we admit that there are some fixtures of city life--the corner
store, the outdoor market, the neighborhood bar--that had best not change at
all. In many ways the future will look a lot like the present. And instead of
taking place on the Moon or up in the air, it will happen on the ground, in the
street, around the corner. If you look closely, you might notice that it's
already here. |
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