Friday, January 25th, 2008 01:02 pm

So, it seems the History Channel held a "City of the Future" contest, challenging eight architectural firms to show their visions of the San Francisco of 2108.  C|Net has a pictorial.

I can't remember the last time I saw such pretentious pie-in-the-sky "and then magic happens" bullshit posing as architectural design.  I think the winning design firm thought they were supposed to be submitting concepts for an SF movie set in the San Francisco of 3108 AD.  It'd sure make me think twice about hiring them to design anything for me.

Friday, January 25th, 2008 06:50 pm (UTC)
WTF!? Looks like a bunch of hippies on acid got together, drew random crap, and decided to try to turn those halucinations into architecture.

"we'll make 'em green, dude!"

"and, dude, the earth need to breathe, so we'll make 'em look like lungs!"


Dorks.
Friday, January 25th, 2008 10:52 pm (UTC)
WTF, indeed!
Whatever drugs these people are or aren't on, I don't want any!
OMG!!
Friday, January 25th, 2008 07:04 pm (UTC)
Lack of realism there. For every city, there will be spawling slums, unless: 1) Earth's population massively reduces (by death or off-world migration) 2) world poverty is solved.

I vote for 1a happening myself.
Friday, January 25th, 2008 07:28 pm (UTC)

You can't make it happen with 1 XOR 2. You must have both 1 AND 2.

(slums occurred even before massive over-crowding)

Though, you might need to generalize #2 to be about social classism, and not just poverty. Slums can be caused by poverty, caste systems, and racial tensions.
Friday, January 25th, 2008 07:44 pm (UTC)
I meant that solving EITHER issue would drastically alter the expected vision.

There are individual solutions that may solve one but not the other.

pop. reduction by death - some large plague (90% dead). wealthy will disproportionately survive, world poverty will still exist.

pop. reduction by migration - wealthy will migrate earlier, poverty still exists. Short-term, this will increase slums (relative to suburbia) until governments offer migration to the unwashed masses (off-world colonial labour? anybody). See Red/Blue/Green Mars and KSR's descriptions of dome slums.

solving world poverty - as long as everybody is willing to live at a lower level (wealth redistribution). This leads to lots of moderate housing, not high-end, but not sprawling slums either. (Probably more like soviet-style apartment blocks as far as the eye can see).
Friday, January 25th, 2008 08:08 pm (UTC)
How exactly would "soviet-style apartment blocks" differ from slums? :-)


Off planet population migration could probably be done now. Just catapult people into the sun.
Friday, January 25th, 2008 08:21 pm (UTC)
By slum, I mean informal shantytown settlements. Large-scale squats. Makeshift dwellings constructed of corrugated metal.

By comparison, soviet-style apartments have electricity, running water and a solid roof.

The shantytown slums exist in large areas of Southern Africa (where I grew up). Areas larger than the middle-class suburban neighbourhoods, often on the fringes of heavy industrial areas, where middle-class people do not want to live.
Saturday, January 26th, 2008 12:54 am (UTC)

But slums in the USA don't tend to be shantytowns. They tend to be ... soviet-style apartment blocks, in various states of disrepair and demolition. Or of similar quality of life.
Saturday, January 26th, 2008 01:59 am (UTC)
and worldwide, far more population lives in shantytowns than said apartment blocks. Living in said apartment blocks is usually correlated with a minimum wage job or social assistance, while shantytowns have no formal income whatsoever. I think shantytowns may yet arise in the US as the economic situation worsens, if they don't already exist in fringe locations (I have seen some settlements around Hilo, HI that were definitely bordering on being shantytowns).

I'll be down in San Jose and outskirts in early April at the MySQL conference. We can debate it further over drinks.
Friday, January 25th, 2008 09:30 pm (UTC)
Off planet population migration could probably be done now. Just catapult people into the sun.
What, a dozen a month? Maybe a dozen a week, if we got all the different launch facilities working at it full time? And that's just to LEO. You'd have to have a lot more delta-V to drop people into the Sun. The problem with the Marching Morons scenario is that if you have the resources to do it, you have the resources to implement much better solutions.
Saturday, January 26th, 2008 12:52 am (UTC)
No, no, I didn't say "launch them into the sun on space vehicles". I said "_catapult_ them into the sun". :-)


We just need better catapult technology.
Friday, January 25th, 2008 07:28 pm (UTC)
Nobody posted a center city of ruin and a ring city of towers, decreasing slowly in height out to the suburban edges. With, of course, a rapidly decreasing height slum on the inside of the ring, with a scrapyard and cardboard city at the inner edges of the ring, with the shelters regularly demolished by government authorities for violating building and public health codes, being in an "uninhabitable area", and being "unfit for human habitation"---driving the denizens of the cardboard slums to constantly rebuild rather than sleep with no shelter.

Nobody posted a small, center city of old, periodically demolished or refurbished buildings as cities become places people no longer have to live to find work, diverse goods, or friends to their tastes. Spread their advantages into the countryside and far fewer people will want to live in cities.

Nobody posted, as a component of the latter, a mondo saltwater siphon from the Pacific, under the mountains, to Death Valley--not filling it to sea level, but low enough to reduce pumping costs. Evaporation from salt marsh plants and resulting rain will increase the water flow to further in-continent lands and greatly increase the readily habitable spread-out land from the east marginal land in. Improved desalination plants will create a local water supply greatly increasing the habitable land in that area, around the new salten sea.

Most city denizens will be illegal immigrants, which will still be an issue, as the grandchildren of current illegal immigrants indignantly object to foreigners coming in and taking up jobs and resources.

There will still be a lot of illegal immigrants from the pest-holes of the world, almost all of which will still be pest-holes. For everyplace that is a pest hole now and not one in 100 years, there will be two places that aren't pest holes now but have become pest holes then. Ring cities (whether the interior is lost through neglect or long-term damage, will continue the trend of separating into ethnic blocks along their perimeters.

Social trends will, as always, combine with technological and resource changes to force architecture into a mostly-compatible mold.
Friday, January 25th, 2008 08:02 pm (UTC)
This isn't as pessimistic as it sounds. As always, life will suck if you're very poor or outcast because of some illegality. For the people who aren't very poor, life will be much better. Their jobs will be in small or few-company towns, their friends will be mostly from over the internet but some from in town--proportions depending on how average and mainstream they are.

Folks with mostly internet friends won't be physically isolated from their friends. They will have regular and semi-regular get-togethers at someplace relatively central to a sub-group, off-center based on who can afford to fly.

Helicopters and small planes will abound. Helicopters are those "family aircars" that everyone predicted. They'll get easier to fly. There will be ultra-light clubs people will join for various reasons. Landing and refueling will be easy enough to make use practical.

Helicopters and small planes will be an upper-middle-class choice, usually. The money available in landing fees and refueling will drive the availability of places to do it.

Mob rioting among those illegals will be much less a concern for most people--one more reason not to live in a city. Dispersed, armed populations don't have to worry about riots.

Professionals who do have to commute to do some centralized task will chopper in--using air volume being the solution to highway traffic, and many, dispersed landing pads being the solution to crowding up airspace.

Small town grocers will stock staples, and take deliveries (for a mark-up) of specialized items made direct by customers and packaged together for bulk delivery to the grocery store (depot). That will be the implementation of Amazon type shopping for food and many other goods.

Virtual 3-dimension simulations of your body (including coloring) will allow you to try on clothes personally via a virtual store's site and see how they fit and look on you. This will be a huge improvement for gift-giving, as you can try clothes on friends and family you'd buy for. You know how that dress will look on your sister in Peoria before you buy it for her birthday. Goods depots will have a machine that updates your virtual body to match your changes, accurately.

Technological advances may or may not give the US a resurgent position in manufacturing. Reason: American culture is highly suited to producing garden-variety workers who interface well with tech, who will not tell you "everything's okay" if it isn't, and similar.

If we do, the Swiss and Canadians will have similar resurgences. Japan and some other cultures will do similarly well. As the number of individual workers become less and less related to production volume, the cultural attitudes that produce corruption produce other production-harming behaviors. Workers from cultures without those attitudes will become more and more competitive, even at higher labor prices.

The pest holes will stay pest holes precisely because of those attitudes. Cultural attitudes are adamantly resistant to change.

China will improve the quality of her products a hell of a lot. It will become more difficult to pass off shoddy products when they get rated online, fast. Chinese hackers will nevertheless get caught, frequently, breaking in and tampering with the ratings.
Friday, January 25th, 2008 08:00 pm (UTC)
The last picture has a clue:

"The History Channel will let viewers pick a national champion from the three regional winners via online polling next month."

So we let TV viewers pick the winner... that explains much.

I did like the ONE firm that based theirs on existing structures. (Hint: if Europe still has thousand year old buildings scattered all over - we're not likely to rid ourselves of our current citites in 100 years)



Friday, January 25th, 2008 08:21 pm (UTC)
I saw picture 4 and, before reading the captions, thought "Oh, good, at least one firm is taking global warming into account, and portraying mass flooding." If you look at it wrong, it looks like those skyscrapers are coming right out of the ocean.

And [livejournal.com profile] yndy is on the right track. Barring catastrophe, SF in 2108 will likely look an awful lot like it does now.
Saturday, January 26th, 2008 02:04 pm (UTC)
Yeah. Likely a few impressive new buildings, likely some patches of urban renewal (especially if there's a really big quake on the San Andreas, or if the Cascadia lets go).
Saturday, January 26th, 2008 12:38 am (UTC)
They might as well have used the San Francisco that sits next to Starfleet HQ. More practical, less drug-induced. (The first one has a strangely Dali-esque feel, which is definitely a out of a "summer of love" SF hallucination...)
Saturday, January 26th, 2008 02:03 pm (UTC)
Yeah. I suspect the San Francisco of 2108 will owe a lot more to WIlliam Gibson and Bruce Sterling than to ... um ... Timothy Leary and Dr. Seuss?
Saturday, January 26th, 2008 05:41 am (UTC)
there's no way this is serious!
Saturday, January 26th, 2008 02:02 pm (UTC)
i imagine it'll get pretty damned serious if anyone tries to actually build any of that LSD-inspired crap.
Saturday, January 26th, 2008 02:42 pm (UTC)
ROFLMMFAO!