Jeanette

Okay so the City of the Future. It's probably true that when most people imagine the city of the future they see a metallic metropolis ablaze with electricity. They see Robots completing every task from something so simple as opening a door to unraveling the complicated structures of bing-bat-boom. Most likely the common notion is that things will be piled so high on top of each other people on earth will travel in hover crafts, while others may choose to live on the moon. Of course all the food to feed the city will be bought from people who make up vegetables in labs. It’s easy to imagine an answer for everything, in pill form and its quite plausible that the lifestyles people lead now will grow and evolve into fatter, lazier, more self absorbed, i'm-alive-but-i-can't-feel lifestyles. I haven't read all of the ideas others have submitted for the City of the Future, so I apologize if you've heard not what I actually think will be seen in the city of the future but what I'd like to see. Maybe that proclivity to see things getting worse for the city in the future is wrong:

One day in the City of the Future realization hit people like an asteroid. They saw that the fast paced lives they spent in their cars on the way to "the office" where they get paid oodles of dollars were devoid of anything resembling happiness. So they slowed down. Of course technology couldn't or wouldn't just get tossed away, but it'd be used for much better things than creating things that the earth can give and ways of killing mass amounts of people. It'd be used to cure horrible diseases and keep the city clean, among other things. Cars would get smaller and wouldn't pollute the environment and more people would ride bikes. Families and Friends would spend more time together. People would communicate face to face instead of screen to screen, cell phone to cell phone. Food would be organic and healthy, because people would realize feeding their babies McDonald's is the worst they could do (as a result all fast food chains would go under). People would be very intelligent, naturally, as new things are discovered everyday no matter what or where, but they would not use their intelligence to create bigger bombs rather, they'd create bigger bridges for communicating with people that live in other Cities of the Future. And you know how your grandparents talk about when they were young and they lived in the city? They talk about how you could go out at night without being afraid, or let your kids play stickball in the street. In the City of the Future your Grandpa will look back to present times and say to you, "You're lucky you're young now, the city I grew up in was not as safe or as kind as it is now."