General Motors Futurama

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Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

AI winter, Air France Flight 447, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, digital map, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hive mind, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, lone genius, Lyft, megacity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philippa Foot, precision agriculture, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, warehouse robotics

The fair was a thrilling, massive 1,200-acre tribute to cutting-edge technologies such as television, electric street lamps, fluorescent lighting, and a new must-have device for emerging middle-class families, the automatic washing machine. GM’s bold exhibit, the “Futurama,” showcased an Automated Highway that by the year 1960 would make “hands-free, feet-free” driving the norm. GM’s Futurama exhibit consisted of a small-scale model of a typical American landscape of the near future. Fairgoers absorbed the scene from the vantage point of moving chairs that carried them through this mesmerizing miniature world.1 Fairgoers sat and glided past tiny cities, farms, stretches of countryside, even an airport in miniature, all seamlessly connected by ribbons of smooth, high-speed automated highways.

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Figure 6.1 As fairgoers listened, the Futurama’s narrative read, “The world we are now seeing is a vision, an artistic conception, which may undergo many changes as it develops into the great realities of tomorrow.” New York World’s Fair, “Futurama: Highways & Horizons,” 1939. Source: General Motors During the ride, the Futurama’s narrator explained that by the year 1960, regular people would enjoy trouble-free personal mobility on automated highways in cars guided by a system of radio controls (the exact technological details of how, exactly, these radio-controlled cars would work were left purposefully vague).

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Radio-controlled cars would steer themselves on and off automated highways, comfortably, safely, and economically, ferrying people from their home to their office to the airport, or wherever else their heart desired. Today, it’s difficult to imagine that a model landscape whose chief selling point was high-speed roads and tiny cities would fascinate millions of people. In 1939, however, the American public was fascinated by GM’s utopian depiction of automated highways. GM’s Futurama, one of the most successful exhibits of the fair, attracted an estimated total of ten million riders. On some days, 28,000 people waited for hours in lines that sometimes stretched two miles long.2 GM’s artificial miniature world was great theater, as seductive and magical as the Technicolor Land of Oz in the film The Wizard of Oz (which was released earlier the same year).

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream by Christopher B. Leinberger

addicted to oil, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, big-box store, centre right, commoditize, credit crunch, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, Ford Model T, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, walkable city, white flight

wa_id=14&lang=1&s_typ=5. New York in 1939–1940 was the peak of the world’s fair movement; never again would more people attend one. The need for international exhibitions has been met by permanent “world’s fairs” and amusement parks, such as EPCOT and Disney World, art biennials, and the Olympics. General Motors, Futurama brochure from the 1930–1940 New York World’s Fair, 1939. David Gelernter, 1939, The Lost World of the Fair (New York, NY: Free Press, 1995), p. 25. Estimates by author after decreasing attendance for repeat and international visitors as compared to the population of the country in 1940. Joseph J.

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Bel Geddes dedicated the book “To the fifty million Americans of the generation of our grandchildren to whom all that is written here will be commonplace.” Those grandchildren are the postwar Baby Boom generation. Norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways (New York: Random House, 1940). My copy of Magic Motorways is inscribed “To Jack in recollection of a tough job we did together, Norman, 14 March 1940.” Jack is John Dineen, the General Motors manager of the Futurama exhibit. E. B. White, “One Man’s Meat,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1939. Lewis Mumford, “The Skyline in Flushing,” The New Yorker, July 29, 1939. Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways. American Studies at the University of Virginia, “America in the 1930s: 1939 NY World’s Fair,” University of Virginia, http://xroads.virginia.edu/ ~1930s/DISPLAY/39wf/taketour.htm.

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The fair attracted 45 million people, setting the all-time record for world’s fair attendance.3, 4 16 | THE OPTION OF URBANISM FIGURE 1.4. Looking down on “the many wonders that may develop in the not too distant future . . . the wonderful world of 1960!” at the Futurama exhibit. (Source: Copyright 2007 GM Corp. Used with permission, GM Media Archive) The highlight of the fair was in the “The Highways and Horizons” exhibit, better known as Futurama (figure 1.4). You had to wait in line at least an hour and maybe even two. According to the authoritative commentator’s voice booming out of the hidden speakers in the exhibit’s 600 moving chairs, Futurama offered “a magic Aladdin-like flight through time and space . . . of the many wonders that may develop in the not too distant future . . . the wonderful world of 1960!”

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter D. Norton

clean water, Frederick Winslow Taylor, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, General Motors Futurama, invisible hand, jitney, new economy, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, scientific management, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal

The motorist replies “How do I prime my face?” 142. McClintock, address to the annual meeting of the American Standards Association, reprinted as “Dat Ole Debbil Speed,” American City 51 (March 1936), 97. McClintock may not have chosen this title. 143. See the narration of GM’s Futurama, its 1939–1940 World’s Fair exhibit, in General Motors, Futurama (1939), a presentation edition of 1,000 issued Oct. 16, 1939. A copy is available at the Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. 144. H. P. Gillette, “How to Reduce Highway Accidents,” Roads and Streets 70 (March 1930), 123–124. 145.

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Insurers retained a taste for vivid descriptions of accident casualties, and popular press attacks on speed in general persisted. But there were no important, recognized, ostensibly disinterested traffic safety experts outside of the ASF. 252 Chapter 9 Figure 9.5 At the 1939–40 World’s Fair in New York, General Motors presented Americans with “Futurama,” a vision of the city of 1960. Norman Bel Geddes designed this enormous model, using his model for Shell as a starting point. It was a city rebuilt for the motor age. Source: Norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways (Random House, 1940), p. 240. The highway safety model’s pinnacle of success was surely reached on February 22, 1955.

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Thus explanations of the motor age city cannot begin with city planners’ visions. The automotive city did not begin on the drafting boards of prophetic designers such as Clarence Stein and Henry Wright (the designers of the automotive new town of Radburn, New Jersey) or Norman Bel Geddes (designer of General Motors’ “Futurama”: its vision of the city of 1960 presented at the New York World’s Fair of 1939–1940). The most effective proponents of the motor age city saw more possibilities in highway engineers, who were represented as mere technicians responding almost automatically to the demands of consumers (gasoline-tax-paying motorists). 131.

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

From Science Fiction to (Almost) Fact “The car just drove around the truck, it steered itself. I hate it! I like to make my own decisions” Michael Knight drives KITT for the first time in Knight Rider The dream of a self-driving car first appeared in the pages of science fiction and then in the General Motors (GM) Futurama display at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.[75] Both RCA and GM experimented in the early 1960s with road-based systems to maintain vehicles a safe distance apart. Computing power didn’t catch up with our imaginations until the 1980s, when Carnegie Mellon University came up with a robot Chevy van and Bundeswehr University Munich developed an autonomous Mercedes van.[76] But these prototypes were unable to function in anything but the most limited circumstances and received little public attention.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

The Coming Fight for the Sidewalk 8. The Real Futures That Tech Is Building 9. Toward a Better Transport Future Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Index Introduction I have seen the future. From April 30, 1939, to October 27, 1940, five million people walked through the doors of General Motors’ Futurama exhibition at the New York World’s Fair. As they left, they were each given a pin inscribed with those five words—and they believed it. Coming out of the depths of the Great Depression, people had lost their hope for the future. Poverty was a widespread reality, and there was no time to think about grandiose visions of a transformed society when every day was a struggle just to put food on the table.

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They were driverless in the sense that they did not have a driver behind the steering wheel and so hid the human labor for spectacle, which is not as distant from what is happening today as it may seem. Self-driving cars became a common feature of the pulp science fiction of the time, and even made their way into seemingly more realistic visions of the future. General Motors’ Futurama exhibition at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York not only imagined millions more automobiles on the road and elevated pedestrian walkways to separate people and cars, but automated highways where vehicles were guided with radio control. The idea was that all these innovations would be in place by 1960, and, while the suburbs and expressways became more common in the following two decades, the technologically enhanced highways did not.

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Either way, people are expected to use a service mediated by an application that benefits one or more tech companies not only by producing a transaction but by creating data that can be fed into an automated system or resold to other companies who can derive value from it. This is a vision of mobility that is hostile to pedestrians in a different way than early automotive concepts like General Motors’ Futurama with its wide highways. Instead, even the sidewalk is imagined to be reoriented for other uses. At the same time as tech has been aggressively trying to get us to stop walking, it has also been creating a service economy designed to deliver whatever it is people want to their doorsteps as quickly as possible.

The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion by Virginia Postrel

Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Dr. Strangelove, factory automation, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, hydroponic farming, indoor plumbing, job automation, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, washing machines reduced drudgery, young professional

“The great, crushing, all absorbing city of today . . . would no longer be a planless jumble of slum and chimney, built only for gain, but an effective instrument for human activities, to be used for the building of a better world of tomorrow.”61 Along with this seductive model of a green and pleasant urban order, the fair included many corporate attractions, from Westinghouse demonstrating an automatic dishwasher to AT&T offering free long-distance calls—and, of course, the famous General Motors Futurama, which beat out Democracity as the fair’s most popular attraction. Latter-day critics condemn the fair for allowing commercialism to taint its technocratic vision. The fair, its president Grover Whalen had written, would allow the visitor to “gain a vision of what he might attain for himself and his community by intelligent, cooperative planning toward the better life of the future.”

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It was filled with appropriate music, and an announcer was describing all these wonderful things as they went by, these raindrop cars, these air-conditioned cities.65 The Futurama was enticing because visitors never considered what it might feel like to be someone else’s toy. With its god’s-eye perspective, the exhibit also gave visitors the illusion of experiencing the future without actually negotiating its quotidian details. The exhibit was exciting, so by implication the life it represented would be, too. Sponsored by General Motors, the Futurama sold cars and the superhighways to carry them. But it didn’t recreate the feeling of driving a car, even a fast one. Instead, it made visitors feel like they were flying. Since passenger air travel was still rare, that feeling itself felt futuristic. The Futurama anticipated a future of suburbs and interstate freeways that looked a lot like the real 1960.

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Frank, 62 Friedman, Alice, 18, 252n79 Friedman, Thomas, 244n10 Frissell, Toni, 2, 5, 25, 25, 212 furs, 20, 20, 99, 131, 193, 210, 215 Furman, Michael (photographer), 78 Futurama, at World’s Fair, 183, 191–93 future, modernity’s glamour and, 178–186, 179, 183 G Gable, Clark, 60, 175 Galella, Ron, 86, 86, 114 Galison, Peter, 90 Garbo, Greta, 22–23, 34, 100–101, 101, 110 Gardner, Diane, 75 Garland, Hamlin, 165 Garnaut, Michelle, 133 Gay Divorcée, The (film), 82, 212 Gehry, Frank, 122 General Motors. See Futurama, at World’s Fair Gervex, Henri, 151 Gibson, Charles Dana, 141–42, 141, 166, 174 Gibson Girl, as icon, 166–69, 166, 167, 169 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 168–69 Gioventu fascista, 190 Givhan, Robin, 4, 79–80 “Glamorous” (song), 210–11, 216 glamour, 2, 3–8, 5, 6, 7 familiarity, fragility, and loss of, 20–21 as form of nonverbal rhetoric, 3–6, 10–11 as illusion, 11–13 as inspiration for life-changing action, 6–7, 46–48 as interaction between object and audience, 12 reality distortion aspect of, 21–23, 22 revelation of emotional truths, 36–38, 221–22 spelling of, 4, 249n6 subjective nature of, 209–15 subjective nature of, and similarity to humor, 17–20 terrorism and, 220–21 used as sales tool, 13–17 utopian parody and wised-up glamour, 216–18 Glamour: A History (Gundle), 138, 245n3 Gleed, Edward C., 25 Goldberg, Vicki, 183, 184 Goldberger, Paul, 130, 244n3 Golden State.

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

The 1920s and 1930s was a period when urban space was socially reconstructed for automobility, and also a pivotal moment in the nation’s gradual though comprehensive shift away from bicycles and mass transit toward the full-blown car culture previewed in the Shell Oil City of Tomorrow campaign (1937) and the General Motors (GM) Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, both designed by norman Bel Geddes.13 Futurama, which was part of the larger Highways and Horizons exhibit staged by GM, featured a massive highway infrastructure on par with those proposed by French architect/ planner le Corbusier in the 1920s and 1930s: an urban vision highlighted by concrete seas of high-speed motorized traffic.

Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature by Ben Mezrich

butterfly effect, CRISPR, Danny Hillis, double helix, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, General Motors Futurama, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, life extension, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, microbiome, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology

In the IBM Pavilion, he’d had the chance to see a mainframe computer up close. In the Ford Motor Pavilion, he’d taken a ride in a quad of Ford convertibles along a skyway whose scenery traced the history of life on Earth, from the dinosaurs through the present to an imagined future not unlike the one depicted by their competitors at GM in Futurama. Walking next to his mother past a domed car that looked more like a grounded jet airplane, with fins supporting what looked to be rocket tubes and wheels that might have twisted flat for takeoff, Church felt his mom’s hand on his shoulder. He knew she could feel that he was trembling, and he half expected her to diagnose him with some new neurosis or disease.

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, big-box store, blue-collar work, congestion pricing, Donner party, edge city, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, Ralph Nader, side project, smart transportation, Southern State Parkway, streetcar suburb, traveling salesman, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen

Hilts, "Planning the Interregional Highway System," Highway Research Board: Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting (Washington, DC: HRB, 1940). [>] Among those praising...: Miller McClintock letter of May 5, 1939, to Pyke Johnson, copied to the Chief (Archives). [>] The man receiving...: Roland Marchand, "The Designers Go to the Fair II: Norman Bel Geddes, the General Motors 'Futurama,' and the Visit to the Factory Transformed," Design Issues 8, no. 2 (Spring 1992); Robert Coombs, "Norman Bel Geddes: Highways and Horizons," Perspecta 13 (1971); Paul Mason Fotsch, "The Building of a Superhighway Future at the New York World's Fair," Cultural Critique 48 (Spring 2001); "Tomorrow's America Modeled in 'Futurama,'" Popular Mechanics, July 1939; Dimendberg, "The Will to Motorization"; Douglas Adams, "Norman Bel Geddes and Streamlined Spaces." [>] You were then directed...: Quotes from the narration are from the Futurama script (THM). [>] Bel Geddes described...: Robert Coombs, "Norman Bel Geddes: Highways and Horizons"; Marchand, "The Designers Go to the Fair II." [>] They could step into a full-scale...: Official Guide Book of the New York World's Fair 1939 (New York: Exposition Publications, 1939). [>] Among their critics...: "Rebuilding Our Cities: Parasitic Modes of Life Must Go, Lewis Mumford Argues," Newsweek, April 18, 1938; Time, April 18, 1938. [>] "Mr.

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The Chief wasn't impressed, either, and thought Bel Geddes a crackpot; the last thing the country needed was fourteen-lane bands of concrete crisscrossing the hinterlands. MacDonald was deeply annoyed when the White House hosted an informal stag dinner for the designer in late March 1939, shortly before the fair opened—even though much of the discussion centered on Toll Roads and Free Roads. Perhaps sensitive to such doubts, GM's high command emphasized in public comments that Futurama was not intended as a literal forecast of the roads to come, but, in the words of company president William'S. Knudsen, " to give expression to our belief that such development will take place on an important scale and perhaps within a shorter period of time than many people now realize."

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Without question, the exhibit made MacDonald's job easier—nothing he did could have so whetted the public's appetite for modern urban highways. And the exhibit's timing couldn't have been much better, coinciding as it did with the release of the bureau's opus. Still, the Chief avoided acknowledging Bel Geddes. When he was called on to speak at a dinner with GM officials in November 1939, he chose a narrow path for his praise: Futurama had been good publicity for the highway industry. " Those of us who are in the highway field, as public officials, have lacked a public relations department to sell that idea to the public on the scale that you are selling it here," he said. " On behalf of the Public Roads [administrators] in the Government, and my associates in the highway field, we express our profound thanks to General Motors for doing this public relations job for us, and for doing it so well."

Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age by Robert Stone, Alan Andres

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, feminist movement, Gene Kranz, General Motors Futurama, invention of the telephone, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, out of africa, overview effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration

The optimistic glimpses of the world yet to come reflected the national zeitgeist of the Kennedy years, coinciding with the heady period when humans first entered outer space. It was a time when it was assumed the United States would undertake big challenges and successfully meet them. General Motors’s popular Futurama exhibit took visitors on a trip to the year 2024. Highly detailed models depicted modernist underwater cities, massive space stations in rotation as they orbited the Earth, and the first human colonies on the Moon. It was an extension of what Wernher von Braun, Collier’s, and Walt Disney had forecast a decade earlier.

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Clarke was impressed with Kubrick’s near-insatiable desire to understand almost everything, from technology to music, and art to philosophy. It was a unique meeting of two avidly curious and creative minds. A few days after their first meeting, Clarke and Kubrick traveled to Flushing Meadows to see corporate visions of the future. At the General Motors Futurama, they saw models of the rotating space stations and lunar colonies, which they would later reinterpret in the epic film they were already discussing. Clarke had jokingly begun referring to their project as How the Universe Was Won; a year later it was given the tentative title Journey Beyond the Stars; and finally, when released four years later, it was known as 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.” President John F. Kennedy at Rice University in 1962. A human settlement on the Moon in the year 2024, presented as part of General Motors’ Futurama exhibit at the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair. Astronaut Ed White becomes the first American to walk in space during the June 1965 Gemini 4 mission. He and James McDivitt were the first NASA astronauts to prominently display the American flag on the shoulder of their space suits.

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A Pattern Language, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, big-box store, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, car-free, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, mandatory minimum, market clearing, megastructure, New Urbanism, parking minimums, power law, remote working, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Seaside, Florida, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, SimCity, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, traffic fines, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, WeWork, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

After a personal request from Gruen, Albert Einstein wrote a letter of support for the group’s performances; Irving Berlin helped them polish their tunes before two Broadway runs. Gruen had even more luck in architecture. To pay the bills during his dalliance in musical theater, the Viennese refugee found work in New York on the sensational General Motors “Futurama” exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair. Norman Bel Geddes’s model city became the fair’s runaway attraction, mesmerizing visitors with a vision of the future in which car traffic had been seamlessly integrated alongside, but separate from, the city’s pedestrian life. By 1941, when he shortened his name from Gruenbaum, Gruen’s English was good enough to begin outlining for U.S. trade journals the theories of shopping psychology on which he would build his career.

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., 72 Fehr & Peers, 258 Feinstein, Dianne, 168 Felt, Mark, 92 Ferguson, Missouri, 163–64 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (movie), 107 Fields, David, 85 Finley Forest housing association, 23 Fioretti, Bob, 126 Five Points, Denver, 20 Flannery, Michael, 95–96, 97–98 Flatiron, Manhattan, 254–55 flooding, in cities, 76–77 Florida, 23, 92 Flushing, Queens, xiv Follett, John, 66–67 food trucks, 250–51 Forbes (magazine), 99 Forbidden City tour, 176–77, 184, 186–88 Fort Worth, Texas, Gruen in, 60–63, 84 four-plus-ones, in Chicago, 204–5 Fourteenth Amendment, Equal Protection Clause in, 28 France, Paris, 274–75 Francis, Pope, 3 Freddie Mac, 241 free parking, 81, 83, 148, 162, 172, 267 affordable housing relation to, 21–22, 282–84 effect on citations, 163–64 effect on traffic, 160–61, 200 Shoup on, 150–51, 160 traded for free transit, 264–66 front porches, 237–38 Fullerton, California, 228–30 Fulton, Bill, 165–67 Futurama exhibit, General Motors, 58 G Garage Employees Union, of Manhattan, 101–2 garage parking, 69–70, 86, 92, 173, 275, 279 cost of, 33, 45 equipment for, 112 municipal, 73 in New York, 99–103 rent relation to, 219–21, 280 SpotHero using, 119–20 street parking compared to, 164–65, 167 in Texas, 63 theft from, 94–96, 97–98 garage rock, 240 garages, private, 236–40, 242 ADUs in, 229–32, 233–35, 241, 242–45 Garcia, Kathryn, 271 Garofalo, Janeane, 9 Garreau, Joel, 178 gas usage, sprawl effect on, 80–81 Geddes, Norman Bel, 58 Gehl, Jan, 254 Gehry, Frank, 108, 191–92 General Motors, Futurama exhibit of, 58 Gennawey, Sam, 105 Genovese crime family, 101–3 George Costanza (fictional character), 91 Georgia, Cobb County, 109 Gifford, Bill, 15 Gilmore, Tom, 189, 190–91, 192 Goldberg, Bertrand, 128 Gotbaum, Betsy, 46 Gottlieb, William, 162 government employees, 43, 45, 46–47, 49 Granite Properties, 221–22, 223 Grant Park Garage, Chicago, 72 Greater London Authority, UK, 274 greenhouse gas emissions, 78–79 green space, parking requirements effect on, 183–84 Greenwich, Connecticut, 9 Gricco, Anthony, 95–96, 97–98 gridlock, 42, 43, 52–53 Griffin, Walter Burley, 238 Griffith, Greg, 268 groundwater absorption, 78 Grubb, Clay, 216–18, 219–20, 221 Gruen, Victor, 51, 57, 66, 71–72, 87, 184 downtown designs of, 60–64, 84, 105 The Heart of Our Cities by, 64–65 park-once strategy of, 200–201 shopping center designs of, 58–60, 65 Guo, Zhan, 274 H Habitat for Humanity, 205, 282 Hales, Charlie, 240 Hammerschlag, John, 113–17, 120 Hardwick, Jeffrey, 59 Harris, Kamala, 39 Hartford, Connecticut, 86–87 Harvard, Bureau for Street Traffic Research at, 53 Hastings, Andrew Glass, 206 Hawaii, kapu violations in, 24 Hayes, Shirley, 255–56 The Heart of Our Cities (Gruen), 64–65 Hecht department store, 68 Herculaneum, parking in, xv Herzog, Jacques, 92 Hickenlooper, John, Daley, R.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, corporate raider, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Dean Kamen, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, global pandemic, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Marchetti’s constant, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SpaceShipOne, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, telepresence, Tesla Model S, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, éminence grise

The Milwaukee Sentinel waxed lyrical over the ‘ghost’: ‘Driverless, it will start its own motor, throw its clutch, twist its steering wheel, toot its horn, and it may even “sass” the policeman at the corner.’ Whether the phantom actually appeared or not is unknown. The next examples of autonomous autos materialized at General Motors’ Futurama exhibition at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which proclaimed that the teardrop-shaped model vehicles that streamed along its miniature highways would communicate with each other and the environment via radio waves, and would be partially autonomous, in the sense that they would be controlled by a traffic management system as well as by their drivers.

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

Speakers built into the benches played a commentary that, as Business Week put it, “unfolds a prophecy of cities, towns and countrysides served by a comprehensive road system.” For Americans emerging from the Great Depression as a new world war was breaking out in Europe, Futurama offered a hopeful vision of a better future. That future, based on the “free-flowing movement of people and goods,” would be built around the car. The exhibit was sponsored by General Motors. The Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair depicted a utopian future built around cars and “magic motorways.” Futurama had been conceived by Norman Bel Geddes, an industrial designer who advocated for building a network of express highways across America, both between cities and within them.

…

It is true that a GM-backed company bought some streetcar operators that were later shut down, but it did so only when the decline of streetcars was already a foregone conclusion, with the aim of ensuring the operators would switch to GM-built buses. What GM definitely did want, however, was highways. Alfred Sloan, the company’s president, had insisted in 1939 that Futurama, which his company had sponsored, was intended “not as a projection of any particular highway plan or program,” but the very fact that he denied it was telling. The title of Bel Geddes’s companion book to the exhibit, Magic Motorways, was another giveaway.

What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, banking crisis, clean water, collective bargaining, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, full employment, General Motors Futurama, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, mass immigration, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Disneyland left California for New York, with its schmaltzy global village pavilion “It’s a Small World After All.” My mother’s venerated old employer, General Motors, sponsored an exhibit called Futurama 2, updating Norman Bel Geddes’s vision of a glorious highway-linked American future that had stunned the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair. In this new Futurama, the entire world is linked by global highways that cut through oceans, rain forests, mountains, polar ice caps, and even outer space (all traveled by presumably GM-made vehicles). The exhibit culminated in the city of the future, and Futurama seemed to be trying to reassure us that the urban experiment would work out in the end.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

In 1939, the Regional Planning Association of America, their national organization in the United States, produced a film that captured the excitement surrounding the scientifically designed, technologically powered transformation of the nation. Screened at the same World’s Fair in New York that featured General Motors’ Futurama exhibit, the film heralded a vision directly descended from the Garden City. “We see homes with grass, children riding bicycles, and men walking to work in clean factories and playing softball,” recount historians Robert Kargon and Arthur Molella. It prefigured today’s smart city ambitions.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

“self-driving,” 38 early self-steering schemes, 5–6 modern-day myths about future, xv–xvi scan, study, and steer as basic tasks, 34–38 self-driving shoes, 52, 53 three big stories of the driverless revolution, 16–20, 187–88, 238, 248, 253 see also financialization of mobility; materialization; self-driving vehicle research; specialization driving as coming-of-age story, 21–22 cruise control and, 24–25, 26 decline in teen driving, 22–23 distracted driving, 25, 28–29, 32–33 drinking and, 24 graduated licensing, 23 drones, 40, 127, 246–47 EasyMile, 60, 103–4, 104 Ebee, 129 e-commerce, 17, 117, 118–19, 120 see also Amazon; continuous delivery Edgar, John, 247 electrification and automation as symbiotic technologies, 54–55 electronic tolling, 169–72 Endeavor space shuttle, 74 English Civil War, 161 e-Palette, 125, 142 EUREF, 129 Evans, Alex, 116 éX-Driver (anime series), 149–50 Facebook, 67 fear of intelligent automobiles, 39, 43, 45 FedEx, 27, 130 “fifth-generation” (5G) wireless grid, 42 financial crisis of 2007–2008, 7, 164, 182 financialization, general, 163–64 financialization of mobility curb pricing and curb-access fees, 220–21, 222–23 electronic tolling, 169–72 monetization of vehicle owner data, 32 overview, 17, 163–65, 244 realignment of money and power, 181–83 see also congestion pricing first mile, 60 fleet learning, 37 Florida Automated Vehicles Summit, 55 Ford, Henry, 12 Ford Motor Company, 12, 32, 58, 218–19, 231, 233 forecasting vs. predicting the future, 13 free roads, end of, 163, 165 free transfer in transit system, 89, 90, 91 Frey, Carl Benedikt, 153, 154, 236 Frost, Robert, 249 fulfillment centers and distribution centers, 121, 123, 132, 136–37, 152, 158, 196n fulfillment zone, 187, 188, 196–99, 198–99 Futurama (1939 World’s Fair), 5 future car of the 1950s, 50–52, 51 Future of Humanity Institute, 238 future shock, 120 Gao Lufeng, 65 Gates, Bill, 237–38 General Motors (GM) AVs tested in San Francisco, xv disengagements by Chevy Bolts, 41 Futurama (1939 World’s Fair), 5 in-car surveillance and driver monitoring, 32 Super Cruise, 29 Gensler, 191 ghost cars, 27 ghost Main Street businesses, 140–42 ghost restaurants, 139–40, 197 ghost road, defined, xvi Gibson, Mel, 28 Gibson, William, 10, 245 GitHub, 248 Glaeser, Edward, 130, 206 Goldsmith, Stephen, 222 Google ambitions, 183 Android operating system, 7 busing of workers, 100 self-driving car project, xiv–xv, 7, 8, 35, 84, 133, 230 and vehicular specialization, 54 Waze acquired by, 87 see also Waymo Gould, Jay, 180 GPS tracks, 35 Grab, 177 graduated licensing, 23 Green Summit, 139 guardian angels, 246–47 Hackett, Jim, 32 Hawking, Stephen, 237–38 Heppner, Henning, 129 Herron, Ron, 74 Hidalgo, Anne, 220 highwaymen (England’s East Midlands), 161 Hitachi, 67, 79 HopSkipDrive, 95 horsecars, 174–75 houses, increased size of, 116 human intelligence tasks (HITs), 41 IBM, 36 Icebox, 243–44 IDEO, 125 IKEA, 72–73 Image of the City, The (Lynch), 228–30 immutable objects, 49 Impellitteri, Vincent, 165 Induct, 103, 104 infill housing, 204, 253–55 informal transit, 99–100, 106 Inrix, 9 Intel, 8, 35 “Introducing the self-driving bicycle in the Netherlands,” 62 Intuit, 125 Jacobs, Jane, 57, 228 JD.com, 118, 119, 137 Jelbi MaaS app (Berlin), 109, 110, 216 Jevons paradox, 144–45 Jevons, William Stanley, 143–44, 145 just-in-time inventory approaches, 157 Ju, Wendy, 40 Kalanick, Travis, 140, 179 Kamen, Dean, 62 Keller, David H., 84–85, 94 Keolis, 104 Khashoggi, Jamal Ahmad, 178 Khosrowshahi, Dara, 98, 179 Kia, 31 Kim, Sangbae, 46 King, David, 132, 247 King, Steven, 42 kipple, defined, 142–43 Kitchen United, 139 Kiva Systems, 136, 137 Kiwibots, 57 Knightley’s (Wichita, KS), 192 Koch, Charles and David, 40 Kohlhase, Janet, 130, 206 Kohn Pedersen Fox, 209, 211 Koolhaas, Rem, 206 KPMG, 117, 218 Kurzweil, Ray, 234 Ladd, Brian, 80 last mile continuous delivery and, 121–29 conveyors and, 124–25 cost savings, 130 driverless shuttles, 60, 123n falling costs and demand, 130–32, 131 in food delivery, 140, 147 freight AVs, 125–26, 130 Hannah school buses, 127 nighttime delivery, 128–29, 130, 217 origin of term, 122 package lockers and, 127, 130, 219, 221 piggybacking deliveries, 126–27 term use in shipping, 123n legibility, 229–30, 231 Legible London, 230 Leonhardt, David, 8–9 Les Vergers Ecoquartier (Switzerland), 202 Levandowski, Anthony, 40, 68 Levy, Frank, 150, 151, 152 lidar, 34–35 Ligier Group, 103 Lime Bike, 67 “Living Machine, The” (Keller), 83–85, 94, 237 loss aversion, 50 Lowe’s, 116 Lufa Farms, 147 Luks, George, 174 Lyft competition with Uber, 177–78, 179 initial public offering, 97, 177 market cap, 97 number of vehicles, 10 relationship with transit, 215 specialization and variety of rides, 95, 96 subscriptions, 244 taxibots, 97 traffic congestion and, 168 Lynch, Kevin, 228–30 MaaS.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

He famously held up a flight home to Newark, refusing to deplane there because his ticket said “New York.” The crew complied, dumping him at an airstrip in Queens instead. La Guardia’s airport, originally called Municipal Field, snatched those flights away from Newark before it even opened, in time for the 1939 World’s Fair next door in Flushing. (Incidentally, the hit of the fair was General Motors’ Futurama, offering a sneak peek of the autopia it was plotting.) If you do this and you win, I asked, then who loses? Does Chicago have to fall for Detroit to prevail? Is this a win-win or a zero-sum game? “We’re in a fight with the rest of the world, not just Chicago,” Ficano countered. “We’re in a fight with Beijing, Shanghai, Dubai, Chicago, and New York,” ticking them off on his fingers.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Westinghouse’s promotional film The Middleton Family represented America’s plight through the experience of one family. While the daughter was seduced by a “radical thinking” boyfriend, corporations offered the family a life of abundance. The film depicts a consumer paradise—not a worker reality—in which machines did all the work and the family could enjoy a world filled with entertainment. GM’s “Futurama” exhibit, designed by Norman Bel Geddes, conveyed people through scenes of an automotive utopia characterized by “accident-free” highways and idealized suburbs. By the time World War II was breaking out in Europe, American businessmen had a hard time deciding which side to support. For the most part, it didn’t matter: nations at war were good customers, no matter their political ideology.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

So why have Americans continued to be so obsessed with owning a house in the suburbs? This wasn’t exactly an accident, either. Almost as soon as we started building the modern suburbs, we began viewing them as an ideal, almost magical way of life. At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, General Motors presented a now-famous exhibit, “The Futurama,” that showed what the American landscape might look like twenty years into the future. The model featured a vast network of suburbs overlaid with an intricate web of high-speed “magic motor-ways.” It was a car-centric vision of the future, it was awe-inspiring, and it actually seemed within reach.

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World by John Dickie

anti-communist, bank run, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, cuban missile crisis, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, Republic of Letters, Rosa Parks, South Sea Bubble, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, white flight, women in the workforce

Formica built a World’s Fair House on the site: this seven-room home made every conceivable use of plastic, including wipe-clean walls inside and out. Sweets were factory-made before spectators’ eyes in the Chunky Candy Corporation Pavilion. Walt Disney’s ‘Audio-Animatronics’–talking robots–amazed all comers when they were deployed in several pavilions. General Motors epitomised the spirit of the event with the vast and highly popular ‘Futurama’ attraction, a cavalcade of awe-inspiring technologies that lay just over the horizon, including lunar crawlers, commuter suburbs in space, underwater motels and laser tree cutters to slice down the world’s forests with ease. The Hall of Magic, sponsored by General Cigar, expressed ‘the magic of the future’ with a machine that blew twenty-foot smoke rings high in the air.

…

The feeling was crystallised by the musical entertainment on offer: the Beatles were there only as bad waxworks; the real thing was shunned in favour of Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, who had been playing the same ‘sweetest music this side of Heaven’ since 1924. The Masonic Brotherhood Center’s worthy exhibits could not compete with what Time magazine called the ‘whoosh and voom’ of the World’s Fair, its ‘gimcrack sorcery’. The Masons did not get near the visitor numbers of the biggest attractions: General Motors’ massive investment in ‘Futurama’ paid off with 29 million visitors, and 27 million rode the conveyor belt past Michelangelo’s Pietà. But a tally for the Masons of 1.25 million was highly respectable. The Grand Lodge of New York was rightly proud of the show it had put on, and of the $52,875.32 made for charity in the first season alone; the beneficiaries would be the children in an upstate Masonic care home.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

My most vivid memory of my tenth year was a trip to Chicago, my first to a big city, and the afternoon we spent at the Museum of Science and Industry, where I had a long-distance Picturephone conversation with a stranger at the Bell System’s World’s Fair pavilion in New York City. General Motors’ fair pavilion was called Futurama. General Electric’s, called Progressland, had been designed by the Disney Company, and Walt was at that moment dreaming up his masterwork in Florida, the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow, EPCOT. A majority of American women making themselves appear new by coloring their hair (and a small minority by surgically enhancing their faces and bodies) was a new phenomenon.

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

“Robots are going to become”: Ken Goldberg, phone interview with Ari Ratner, October 4, 2013. Just as it would have been difficult: “Statistics,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html; “Follow the Audience . . . ,” YouTube Official Blog, May 1, 2013, http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2013/05/yt-brandcast-2013.html. General Motors introduced: “The Original Futurama,” Wired, November 27, 2007, http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/15-12/ff_futurama_original. Radar was a device on a hilltop: Burkhard Bilger, “Auto-Correct,” New Yorker, November 25, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/11/25/131125fa_fact_bilger?currentPage=2.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

When he was not allowed to build a bridge between Brooklyn and Battery Park at the southern tip of the island, he was given permission to dig the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. At the end of the decade he was able to dream of a completely new city when he was put in charge of the 1939 World Fair, held at Flushing Meadow, and dedicated to the ‘world of tomorrow’. Moses co-opted General Motors to sponsor the Futurama display. It was a city, inevitably, that was created around the car: the city centre was replaced by vast highways lined by skyscrapers, embedded in parkland; suburbs were linked together by clean expressways. As the designer Norman Bel Geddes announced, ‘Speed is the cry of our era’; the ease and security of a life sealed within the carapace of the automobile, hurtling through the city without obstacles, the perfection of velocity replacing unpredictable human contact.

The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

Robert Moses intended this park to be the “Versailles of America,” but the severe, perfectly symmetrical pathways radiating out from the sphere, The world comes to Queens In late April 1939, as the US emerged from the Great Depression and war loomed, 1200 acres of the new Flushing Meadows–Corona Park became the stage for America’s love affair with modernity. Drawing visitors from across the nation (and delegates from 62 others), the 1939–40 World’s Fair featured displays of technologies yet to be realized, including robotics and fluorescent lights. General Motors sponsored a “Futurama” ride through a utopian modern city, and New Yorkers saw broadcast television for the first time. The fair was a great success, and brought attention to this little-known borough. In part due to the reputation established by the expo, the United Nations briefly operated from here following World War II.

The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

The world comes to Queens In late April 1939, as the US emerged from the Great Depression and war loomed, 1200 acres of the new Flushing Meadows–Corona Park became the stage for America’s love affair with modernity. Drawing visitors from across the nation (and delegates from 62 others), the 1939–40 World’s Fair featured displays of technologies yet to be realized, including robotics and fluorescent lights. General Motors sponsored a “Futurama” ride through a utopian modern city, and New Yorkers saw broadcast television for the first time. The fair was a great success, and brought attention to this little-known borough. In part due to the reputation established by the expo, the United Nations briefly operated from here following World War II.

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities by Witold Rybczynski

benefit corporation, big-box store, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, fixed income, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Seaside, Florida, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

This was in many ways an adaptation of the Voisin Plan, but Bel Geddes’s vision of the urban future was far more expansive than Le Corbusier’s, and the cities in Futurama were surrounded by sprawling suburban communities, connected to one another by a network of superhighways. Since the exhibit was part of the General Motors pavilion, the model was equipped with thousands of tiny moving cars. On leaving Futurama each visitor received a blue-and-white lapel button reading I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE. It didn’t take twenty years for the future to arrive, however. Only four years after the World’s Fair closed, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, encouraged by Robert Moses, started to build a series of unusual residential projects in New York City.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The New York Herald Tribune mocked him up in a cartoon looking through Coke bottle glasses, overly inspired by the possibilities of rebuilding America. But his tour was a success. “This is architecture’s hour,” he said on a radio broadcast, which was widely reported. Four years later, General Motors hosted an exhibit at New York City’s World’s Fair entitled Futurama, designed by Norman Bel Geddes. Its “vision of the future” looked like something Le Corbusier could have designed. A scale model spread across an acre depicted a city of towers and parks—and highways, eighteen lanes wide. It featured more than 50,000 model cars and 500,000 individual buildings.

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

The 1939 New York World’s Fair and the 1949 Stockholm World’s Fair started a fashion for utopian speculation about the ‘World of Tomorrow’ (the theme at New York). The most popular exhibit at New York was Democracity, a diorama of the ‘city of the future’, designed by Henry Dreyfuss and housed in the strikingly spherical Perisphere building. In the General Motors pavilion, Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama anticipated what the city would look like in 1960, focusing in particular on the impact of the automobile on future life. Some twenty-five million awestruck people visited. Shanghai’s 2010 Expo had an urban theme: ‘Better City – Better Life’. It is thought that staging the event cost the Chinese government as much as $58 billion (£38 billion), more than the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Various conspiracy theories have argued that this was a plan to force people to buy cars by eliminating public transit. This may have been true, but it was hardly necessary. The streetcar had been fatally wounded when the definition of the street changed. It drowned in a sea of cars. Futurama LEFT: The future is revealed at the vast General Motors pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York: a city built for cars. RIGHT: The Futurama vision has now been built into cities around the world. The fourteen high-speed lanes of Dubai’s de facto main street, Sheikh Zayed Road, are impossible for pedestrians to cross for miles at a time. (Left: GM Media Archive; right: Charles Montgomery) The final assault on the old city arrived via the interstate highway system.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, British Empire, cotton gin, Easter island, Fellow of the Royal Society, General Motors Futurama, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Kitchen Debate, lateral thinking, Louis Pasteur, refrigerator car, scientific management, sexual politics, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Exhibitions, many sponsored by auto manufacturers eager to sell cars and, even more importantly, to sell Americans on the nation’s need to invest heavily in massive highway construction, hammered home that the automobile was the key to social and economic progress. At the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40, with its theme of “Building the World of Tomorrow,” the biggest hit was the General Motors “Highways and Horizons” pavilion, featuring a sixteen-minute “Futurama” conveyor-belt ride. Twenty-eight thousand visitors a day peered down from moving armchairs onto a thirty-six-thousand-square-foot miniaturized model of the United States as imagined in 1960. In this America of tomorrow, multilane “Magic Motorways” traversed the landscape, safely accommodating automobile speeds up to a hundred miles an hour as they shot across elevated overpasses and wide-span suspension bridges, through rugged mountain passes, and around dramatic cloverleafs.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

It took Emmeline Pankhurst and the suffragette movement slightly more than a decade to force the British government to give women the right to vote.14 The Soviet Union seemed so solid as to be eternal, but once cracks started to appear, the edifice crumbled in just a few months.15 In 1939 General Motors presented visitors to the World’s Fair in New York City with an imaginative vision of what the future could look like. It was called Futurama and consisted of an enormous model of multiple high-rise buildings, vast suburbs, and large motorways for travel between them, necessitating the use of cars.16 Imagination is going to be critical as we work to transform today’s urban sprawl to make it fit for the future.

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, animal electricity, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, book value, British Empire, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, margin call, Menlo Park, price stability, railway mania, Right to Buy, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, working poor

The kitchen of the future was a marvel, Ned agreed, but it had come too late for him to enjoy.9 The future was everywhere around him, or so the exhibits promised. He wandered across the Bridge of Wings to the Transportation Zone. The General Motors complex of four interconnected buildings used the theme “Highways and Horizons” for the largest individual exhibit at the fair. Ned joined the long line and waited patiently for the Futurama, which had become the biggest hit at the fair. Once through the imposing sloped entrance, he slipped into one of 552 paired seats fitted with individual speakers that carried a soothing narrative. Below him, covering thirty-six thousand square feet, la y a model of a highway system as imagined in a metropolis of 1960, with seven-lane expressways monitored by radio control towers that allowed speeds as high as a hundred miles an hour.