IS THERE A FUTURE FOR THE CITY OF TOMORROW?

THE CONSEQUENCES, OF OUR OBSESSION 7 WITH URBAN DYSTOPIAS AND UTOPIAS

- M. NOLAN GRAY

FOR ALL ITS pretense of futurism, EPCOT today feels like an anachronism. The first park to open after the death of Walt Disney, it dispenses with Disney World's traditional cartoon characters and Main Street, instead celebrating its founder's preoccupation with progress. Early promotional materials for the parkoriginally envisioned by Walt Disney as a full-scale Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow-invite visitors to imagine a world of technological progress, centralized planning, and scientific management.

Proposed in the twilight years of our collective love affair with urban utopianism, the park was opened in 1982. But for the next 40 years, when cities of tomorrow came up at all in culture, they were invariably dystopian, from the rampant crime of RoboCop's Detroit to the casual traffic violence of Akira's Neo-Tokyo. Until quite recently, urban settings were so central to dystopian fiction that entirely new cities were often invented to host them, as with Cyberpunk 2077's Night City, or Ghost in the Shell's New Port City.

In our initial attempts to build the city of tomorrow, we sliced up cities with freeways, remade neighborhoods along untested design principles, and locked communities into the zoning straitjacket. The results were an unambiguous failure, yet the nightmares they conjured led subsequent generations to double down on growth controls. The ironic result is that cities like Los Angeles today suffer from many of the crises predicted in cyberpunk futures, but in a form that is, for lack of a better word, boring. Say what you will about Blade Runner 2049's Los Angeles, at least it has holographic sex robots.

After a century of fantasizing about what it would be like to have technocrats set the terms of urban life-or fretting about what might happen if they don't-perhaps it's time for a city of tomorrow that lets individuals plan for themselves.