The Future of Cities. Today!
What is a city?
It’s an obvious question with an even more obvious answer. But the answer probably depends on whom you talk to. An urban planner or mayor, a suburban housewife or a cop, an economist or a game designer, everyone will flavor the basic answer of — big place with lots of buildings and people–with a different spin.
Visions of the future offers a bit of narrative and visual tour of images of the city of tomorrow as it has developed across a grab bag of artists and architects.
Without putting too fine a point on it, these collages of visions of the city provide a context for seeing how easy it is to feel that a virtual place is real. We’ve already reduced our actual urban experiences into an imagination of what a city is, or could be. Visit Exodar in World of Warcraft, and it feels real, in part, because we are used to imagining our cities.
New York New York in Vegas, anyone?
(Link via students in my summer class!)