*cough cough*

[unixronin]

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.

Comments

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

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.

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

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.