From the Future of Cities Exhibition

The 2010 Saturation City project imagined Melbourne in 40 years’ time, when sea levels have forced the city to concentrate into ‘superblocks’ rising above the water. Photograph: Bild Architecture/A Visual History of the Future

The future is a resource – it helps raise expectations, hopes and even capital. Creating anxieties about the future or dramatizing risks, rewards and calamities about what it has in store for us have been used by prophets, religious beliefs and other ideological systems for centuries to attract followers.

In this stage of globalized capitalism – the idea of the futuristic city – a particular kind of city – has entered into our sub-conscious to such an extent that people who help produce it – or evoke it in the present – can raise huge capital to translate its visions into reality.

Architectural visions depend on images that have emerged from a variety of thought processes – space age technology, post – industrial design, neo-medieval contemporary narratives to craft structures and through them whole cities, that feed all kinds of fantasies about the future.

They are embedded in larger narratives about the city at large. Cities of the future seem to be following the path of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies – being imagined in a particular way – and then having them translated tangibly.

This is a series of posts dedicated to several more possibilities that have not necessarily been tapped by city makers. Architectural visions tend to be caught in certain narratives and become the anchoring points for imagining cities as a whole. Urban visions and celebrations of certain kinds of architecture create a co-dependent world of design and contribute to expanding and limiting our ideas of what the future could be.

We kickstart this series by connecting with this piece from the Guardian that reviews the exhibition opening today in London.