The City (1939 Documentary)

[Luminare]

Found a cool piece of retro future while I was on reddit. This is documentary called The City from the 1939 New York City World's Fair! It's definitely an interesting watch. I say it's a cool piece of "retro future" because we never really achieved this vision of the self sustaining, walkable, balanced, nonexpansive, suburban utopia. Instead the dream mutated into a quiet nightmare that stretched the city so thin it became almost unrecognizable. Instead of the dream of self-sustaining hamlets and towns of suburbs it became industrialized and like any machine hit the expansion button and never ceased. Yes, there were many interesting experiments which could be options on how to reform suburban culture and planning, but didn't really ever live up to the dream as portrayed in this documentary.

 

I personally love retro futures. It's so interesting to see where we thought we would be years in advance and how naive we were to what could transpire later on or how we could even assemble such a dream world of suburban life. Any opinions? Give the doc a watch. It's along 30mins and is a neat portal into the past while looking into a potential retro future we came close to achieving.

 

Hopefully this doesn't get turned into a urban vs. suburban battle. That's not what this is about. What did you think of it? Did we ever really achieve this kind of new city?

 

 

[IronTiger]

Definitely a product of the times, but it was also a time when the inner city sucked, leading up to the era of suburbs when those that could afford it left.

New Urbanism kind of sounds like a similar concept tho.

[mkultra25]

I personally love retro futures. It's so interesting to see where we thought we would be years in advance and how naive we were to what could transpire later on or how we could even assemble such a dream world of suburban life. 

 

If you're not already aware of it, you should check out Matt Novak's Paleofuture blog (http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/). He's also on Twitter as @paleofuture.