Over the last 250 years of rapid urbanization, cities have been arenas for competing visions of the future from different planners, politicians, artists, corporations, and commonplace people. For example, some advocated for segregated suburbs, while others advocated for egalitarian, concentrated urban areas. As part of Professor Bruno Carvalho’s new book-length project, I investigated a variety of online oral histories of primarily 19th and 20th-century immigrants, women, and freed slaves, interrogating their experiences in cities of the United States and their expectations for the future. I have also researched representations of future cities in various early to mid-20th-century advertisements. Those materials often speak to how optimism, the state of the economy and US foreign affairs correspond with access to prosperity, often unequal, based on race, class, gender, and citizenship. Patterns from people of the past reveal that at best, humans have a mixed success rate at predicting the future and that as such, changes in policy, perception, culture, and the arts could influence the people of today to reimagine their own future cities, especially with regard to the role of cities in addressing climate change and the catastrophic visions many hold regarding the future of the planet’s climate.
This project is being developed by Alice Chang, supervised by HMUI Co-Director, Bruno Carvalho and sponsored by the SHARP Harvard College Program, in collaboration with HMUI.