This video reminds me of those tobacco company ads from the forties and fifties that portrayed cigarettes as a healthy part of any sensible person's lifestyle.

My other thought on seeing this video was that if any of us new urbanist/smart growth types were to spin out a vision for biking, walking, and transit that were even half as fantastical as this we would be forcibly committed to a mental institution -- yet the highways-forever folks are still viewed as intellectually respectable, and we are often accused of utopianism or worse.

by Casey Anderson on Dec 5, 2009 12:05 pm  

I like these videos from the "atomic reactors can do ANYTHING" era. They also clearl have no downsides and require no shielding.

This is what you get when your creative folks don't consult even a little bit with engineers. But that wasn't really the purpose of the movie anyway.

Some of this stuff came true. Especially the urban form with everything all spread out.

I also like that no one expends any energy walking anywhere (mother an son are carries from store to store on moving walkways, and it's apparently efficient to carry dad and his car to his office) and yet no one is morbidly obese.

Like most of the films from the era, they missed the connection between technology making the homemaker's job easier, and the possibility of women working outside the home now that keeping a home doesn't take 60 hours a week. Do mom and junior really go to the mall every day?

by Michael Perkins on Dec 5, 2009 2:15 pm  

I'm not old enough to have seen this when it came out, but I do remember seeing this a number of times, I think maybe I saw it once at Tomorrowland in Disneyland when I was really little.

It's extremely interesting to see how people thought that in order to make life better almost EVERYTHING had to be thrown out when it came to architecture, planning and transportation and only through something entirely new had to be made.

My favorite comment is the sarcastic tone of "from his parking spot, father might actually have to walk to his office."

I love the Monsanto house as the model of the home too. Maybe Disney had to put that in there? All the architecture looks like it was done by Saarinen.

Also love how when the ambulance flies in it skips past the body lying on the highway!

by Boots on Dec 5, 2009 2:28 pm  

Notice how many of those predictions actually came through... decentralized living areas, GPS, transformed cities and tons of parking.

by John on Dec 5, 2009 3:05 pm  

When I watch stuff like this (and it includes old sci-fi set in their future/our past) what always strikes me is how they can both overreach (such as cars that run on their own atomic energy and air conditioned highways) and be shortsigted (punch-cards and push button controls) at the same time.

by David C on Dec 5, 2009 3:52 pm  

@John: Don't forget containerized intermodal shipping; that came true too.

by Tim on Dec 5, 2009 4:00 pm  

Hmmm. The future certainly ain't what it used to be.

by ksu499 on Dec 5, 2009 6:13 pm  

Is anyone surprised that Disney of all corporations was excited about this sort of change? They turned the walkable Main Street into a novelty that they could charge through the nose for the middle class to come experience at Disneyland.

The "truck-train" concept was interesting to me though. I may be missing something, but I wonder if elements of that concept could be implemented on our railroad network.

by Dave Murphy on Dec 5, 2009 10:15 pm  

oh noes! "father will have to walk [5 feet] to his desk from his parking space."

the only real problem with this animation is that everyone shown should be an obese blob, weighing in the neighborhood of 650 pounds, if they're going to spend all their days just sitting around in their cars.

by IMGoph on Dec 5, 2009 10:22 pm  

Silly, you just take your exercise pills.

by shy on Dec 5, 2009 10:53 pm  

To give the video some credit this was 50 years ago, what do we think the future will be like in 50 years?

/

by Matt R on Dec 6, 2009 12:56 am  

I like the undersea Springfield Interchange.

I also like this future where none of the other Jetsons flips you the bird in the tubular highway. But what really impressed me is that you can do 85 in a car that's about the size of a Honda Civic, yet still not have to wear a seat belt.

by David on Dec 6, 2009 7:30 am  

"The "truck-train" concept was interesting to me though. I may be missing something, but I wonder if elements of that concept could be implemented on our railroad network."

It was implemented ... some 30 years ago or more. "Compartmentalization" (i.e., shipping goods in containers that can easily be moved from trucks to trains to ships to trucks, etc.) is part of what so drastically lowered the price of the goods we consume compared to back then (in real dollar terms.) It's what allows us today to get everything and anything we need made anywhere in the world ... including from countries with low labor wages like China. It also changed whole industries and the areas where they operated. Take for example the longshoremen and our ports. Where back in 1958 ships had to be expertly loaded and unloaded with back breaking labor (think 'loading a U-Haul truck with loose items'), compartmentalization using containers instead moved us toward fewer and larger ports requiring little in the way of longshoreman labor. Many cities were thus able to reclaim their waterfronts in whole or in part for other uses. What were once dirty, dangerous parts of cities became property with 'a view of the water'. For example, as recently as the early '80s that part of Georgetown south of M Street which nowadays is filled with expensive condos enjoying beautiful views was then still filled with abandoned warehouses from its shipping past ... as well as with coal powerplants and other 'dirty' uses which now exist as movie theaters and the like.

This movie does a great job of expressing the then folks hopes for the future ... a future which we're now benefitting from because they dared to dream. I think what gets 'lost in the translation' between then and now, is that we don't see the 'bad parts' that their vision succesfully dealt with. We just see the new probables that came with the fruition of their dreams. For example, we don't see their present where many people lived in crowded inner cities ... some without indoor facilities, some without even electricity. We see instead the 'long commutes' the decendents of these people must now endure ... in exchange for living in houses with proper plumbing, heat, 50 inch screen TVs and a safe place for their children to play. We don't see the dirty and crowded city conditions of those who came before. We see instead now the clean and well-equipped condo or renovated rowhouse that is sitting in its place and think 'Wouldn't all these people be better off living in this utopic downtown, then they are having to commute in from the suburbs?" We don't put 2 and 2 together, that the utopic downtown of today wouldn't even exist where it not for the dreamers of yesteryear who rightfully saw that only rapid growth (and the car that permitted this rapid growth to occur so quickly) could solve the problems of old, overcrowded urban areas.

by Lance on Dec 6, 2009 10:24 am  

And they had the vision of video conference. That was pretty cool. Overall, I had this feeling of real loneliness in all that, like it was a world that robots could better inhabit.

by Tony James on Dec 6, 2009 11:13 am  

I'm curious as to how father met mother. Seems like all possibilities of social interaction are relegated to the five feet you have to walk between your parking space and your car.

by JTS on Dec 6, 2009 11:25 am  

I'm curious as to how father met mother.

On-line?

by Lance on Dec 6, 2009 11:28 am  

I'm curious as to how father met mother.

Even better question: Why is she even in the car? She obviously can't drive. Shouldn't she be home cooking dinner with her new microwave device?

Additionally, I love how "family time" is immediately interrupted by a business video conference.

by Adam L on Dec 6, 2009 11:36 am  

Where to start, what to say? With everything pre-programmed, life couldn't be worth living. And why is it only us (USA) that has to rebuild our cities? You wouldn't have known they traveled to India and Egypt with out they're traditional architecture speaking for those cultures. Hey, that might work in Afganistan!

by Thayer-D on Dec 7, 2009 6:28 am  

Just propaganda for the highway and sprawl lobby with some nice bones thrown in to capture the people of that time's imagination.

Rather than addressing things like indoor plumbing and cramped conditions incrementally, they somehow thought that the best way was to destroy the society. Just naive. I agree with Lance that the reason why this film caught the imagination of the people of this time period was because it seemed to address some of the challenges of their day. However, why couldn't they have addressed the challenges of their day rather than destroying everything?

Oh, right. There was and is huge profits to be made for a select few people in the highway and sprawl lobbies. Sadly, those profits come at everyone else's expense.

I also echo JTS's observation that such a society wouldn't even allow father to meet mother. It's hard enough to meet anyone as things currently exist. I can't imagine the depression and frustration from the total lack of dating opportunities in this vision. It would be very depressing with all the isolation. Everyone would have to take happy pills or something else out of fantasyland. It looks a lot like something out of the dystopian novel Brave New World, minus the promiscuity.

It just seems like a wet dream for control freaks who want everything to be "just so." Nothing out of one's control... until the energy source dries up or one of the many highly complicated mechanized parts breaks.

by Cavan on Dec 7, 2009 9:44 am  

I noticed the elimination of walking and social interaction as major themes, along with a deserted feel to the landscape. There was a ridiculous amount of infrastructure for so few people. It's amazing how resources seemed to be limitless so soon after the Great Depression.

by Matthias on Dec 7, 2009 10:33 am  

"It's amazing how resources seemed to be limitless so soon after the Great Depression."

Resources are only limited for those without imaginations ... the ability to realize that the only real constraints we have over time is the limit of our imaginations. That 50s generation reached for the stars ... and ended up landing on the moon.

I bet there were people who at one time wondered, 'how will we ever settle this vast country? there are only so many horses, mules, and wagons to go around.' Their intellectual descendents today are saying 'how can we possibly continue to live a 21st century lifestyle? there's only so much oil left to find.'

Attacking a problem incrementally can only give an incremental solution at best. Attacking it systematically from a top down approach is where the value-added comes in. Sometimes we must destroy in order to rebuild greater.

by Lance on Dec 7, 2009 10:49 am  

This was the scariest thing I have ever watched.

by NikolasM on Dec 7, 2009 11:00 am  

Moving walkways make window-shopping effortless, until you want to stop and look at something!

by Matthias on Dec 7, 2009 11:08 am  

But, I think it's reasonable to criticize the thinkers of that time for not even trying to consider the consequences as well as the benefits of their visions. In the real world, there are constraints and unforeseen externalities.

I also doubt that our forebears' communities were so absolutely horrible that they required destruction rather than improvement. The only justification I can see for destroying so much of the United States' cultural infrastructure was that 1) it was taken for granted and 2) a select few people stood to make untold billions in profit.

Dreaming is good. We certainly do it all the time on this website with our fantasy transit maps. However, we do it with the intention of improving our world, the real world. We don't try to make utter fantasy reality. You don't see fantasy conveyor belt maps or PRT pitches here. Every time that someone has tried to take an utter fantasy to the real world, it has ended badly. In this respect, we've gotten off lightly. We're not ruined but we created many problems for ourselves.

Scorched earth doesn't work. An example of a scorched earth type system is an economic depression. After the Great Depression, how long did it take to alleviate all the human suffering? After you burn down a forest, you do get small green things growing out of the ground fairly soon. But, how long does it take until that forest fully grows back with a comparable ecosystem? Decades? Centuries?

Similarly, Lance does have some good points about our core city being made more attractive because of the introduction of many modern conveniences that did not necessarily exist in those living spaces before the suburbanization era. However, why did we have to destroy our cities and create all that suburban sprawl that will be an environmental and fiscal millstone around our collective neck for decades in order to upgrade the quality of the housing in our walkable urban places? It sure seems like the worst possible solution to the problem of substandard housing. Why couldn't they have dreamed of a cleaner city with better housing? Why did they have to dream of bringing Brave New World to life?

by Cavan on Dec 7, 2009 11:08 am  

Sorry, I forgot to mention that the previous comment was in response to Lance's ideas at 10:49.

by Cavan on Dec 7, 2009 11:09 am  

This just reminded me of the "Park at your desk" concept from the same era that was built into an office building right here in DC. Just three steps across the hall, with minimal caloric expenditure!

by Matthias on Dec 7, 2009 12:15 pm  

"Resources are only limited for those without imaginations"
Or a decent grounding in reality. One of the best urban spaces, the Campidoglio is breathtaking for exactly the opposite reasons. The real creativity comes from imagining what could be while taking into account what actually exists.

"Sometimes we must destroy in order to rebuild greater."
Again, while it sounds good on paper, at the scale it's ment here we are talking about (human) ecological disaster.
The organic growth of cities growing incrimentally would be lost to say nothing about our collective memory.

Speaking of dreaming big though,one might be tempted to say why is what Baron Von Hausman did in Paris any better than what Robert Moses did in New York? For starters he re-built in a commonly understood and appreciated way, and secondly, he used a whole lot of decorations. I know we're supposed to be so above that sort of thing, but we're not.

by Thayer-D on Dec 7, 2009 12:29 pm  

"he re-built in a commonly understood and appreciated way"

I'm not sure that is the case. At that point in time, what was commonly understood and appreciated were narrow streets with medieval origins which 'the people' could use to barricade themselves away from government authorities any time they did not concur with the king's/emporer's wishes. (It was also a mismash of styles.) What Haussman brought to 19th century Paris in the way of streets large enough to fit armies through and a standardization in styles was as radical a departure from what was before in Paris as was the suburbanization of the US post WWII. In retrospect you aren't seeing the difference between Haussman's Paris and the Paris beforehand, because you are looking at it from far far away ... From a century where even the 'wide' grid streets of the L'Enfant Plan (e.g., S Street) would be considered 'narrow' in today's terms. This is of course testiment to the success, and necessity, of the evolving changes brought about through time.

by Lance on Dec 7, 2009 2:59 pm  

They had been building straight and wide roads through just about all medieval cities since the Baroque period of the 1600's, so it was commonly understood that these where "improvements" to the sewage infested streets of medieval Paris. As for the buildings, the vast majority where a very common middle class apartment building type of that time, and their style was almost uniformly classical although secondary to the typology. We make too much of this "crowd control argument" though. The main reason was to modernize and update the city to allow it to grow and for a lot of developers to cash in. That's a for cry from suburbanization, which didn't happen in cities, and more like urban renewal (Robert Moses), which did.

BTW, L'Enfant's streets aren't narrow by today's terms unless one grew up in Brasilia. Traffic engineers have slowly been narrowing streets for a variety of reasons.

by Thayer-D on Dec 8, 2009 6:04 am  

Father won't have to walk to his desk, silly. There will be a personal human transporter to bring thin there!

by Hagan on Dec 10, 2009 7:18 am