Rethinking the American City: An International Dialogue

9 Future City

193 9 Future CItY Jeffrey l. MeiKle future city. The very words have a promising ring, evoking optimism and more particularly a faith in progress—whether the ever-onward-andupward evolutionary variety of the late nineteenth century or the rational planning invoked by countless utopian visionaries during the twentieth century. Rows of skyscrapers set in healthful green space; separate zones of commerce, industry, and residence; wide boulevards of smoothly circulating traffic; small clumps of pedestrians rendered to afford a sense of scale: all of these comprised parts of the visual vocabulary of urban modernity, whether taken from plans, renderings, and models or photographically abstracted from an always messier reality. More recently, at the end of the last century and the opening of a new millennium fraught with uncertainty, threatened by overpopulation and environmental collapse, and possessed by multiple voices whose insistent diversity overwhelms outmoded dreams of a universal culture, the metropolis of tomorrow seems more likely to be a product of decay and sporadic attempts at renewal; an endlessly sprawling shantytown engulfing gated pockets of wealth whose carefully arranged order echoes past visions of the future; a palimpsest of fragments, survivals, and hesitant or defiant statements of competing individuals and groups; or, especially in the imagined realms of science fiction, Hollywood films, and video games, a dystopian extrapolation whose various representations share a foreboding sense of bleak hopelessness. If the concept future city has been regarded as historically inspired by American utopian prototypes or realized actualities, as in Rem Koolhaas’s clever portrayal of the built reality of Manhattan as a “retroactive manifesto ,”1 perhaps that is because America initially seemed a tabula rasa. As John Locke famously observed, “in the beginning all the world was America,” an Edenic emptiness so vast, so extreme, that in his interpreta9 Jeffrey L. MeikLe 194 tion, property, money, and trade lacked any meaning.2 Although this supposed American exceptionalism has been most often interpreted in terms of nature, even the Puritan colonists in New England in the early seventeenth century foreshadowed an insistent American urbanism, with their invocation of a future “city upon a hill.”3 Into the early nineteenth century, both Europeans and Americans dreamed of erecting new societies in the New World’s seemingly pristine landscape, as in the case of Robert Owen at New Harmony, Indiana, or the Fourierist communitarians of Brook Farm in Massachusetts. Just north of Cairo, Illinois, a now mostly derelict town situated on a wedge of land formed by the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, an official highway sign announces that motorists are entering the locality of “Future City.” Set in a landscape of rural blight, this ironic marker suggests an aura of irrelevance, even unreality, that now surrounds most utopian dreams. Local legend explains the name Future City as a corruption of Futrell City, a vanished hamlet supposedly named for Richard Futrell, the area’s first settler.4 That far-fetched explanation seems more a product of long-standing local disappointment and embarrassment than anything else. Just up the road is the similarly nonexistent village of Urbandale, and twenty-five miles to the east is Metropolis, Illinois, population about six thousand. That such expressions of faith in the future were located in downstate Illinois is perhaps appropriate, considering that the first extensive American projection of a future city occurred in Chicago at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. As is well known, Daniel Burnham, the architect who coordinated planning and construction of the Columbian Exposition, made a conscious decision to abandon the Crystal Palace model of world’s fairs, popular since the first international exposition held in London in 1851, instead mandating a formal assemblage of white neoclassical buildings to house the fair’s exhibits. His choice of this grandiose style, although it marked the emergence of the United States as a cosmopolitan nation of imperial scope, also more practically promoted ease of collaboration among architects who had mostly all trained in Paris in the Beaux Arts tradition. Burnham eventually adopted a uniform white hue for the major buildings, because FUTURE CITY 195 it was simpler to work with than his initial plan for a complex thematic color scheme. Although the overall harmony of the expo’s central area thus owed something to chance, its compelling beauty, and the impressive efficiency with which Burnham organized the functional infrastructure of a vast site conjured out of nothing, contrasted sharply with the...