The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World, by Bruno Carvalho
Harvard professor Bruno Carvalho’s childhood was divided between Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia. The country’s old capital and its purpose-built replacement couldn’t look more different, at least in tourist brochures. However, poverty lives on the outskirts of both cities, and Rio is marked by deliberate urban planning, including streets whose grid-pattern signified “progress” and “positivism.” In some minds, urban planning was a “science” not unlike Social Darwinism, predicated on weeding out and ostensibly improving the human race.
As Carvalho insists, the growth of cities was inextricable from the spread of modernity, and yet the “modern” ideas put forward for the future of cities seldom materialized as planned. The author cites numerous examples, but has special fun referencing “The Jetsons,” which dressed JFK’s American suburbia in fancier gadgets. By touching a button, George Jetson folded his flying car into a suitcase. Needless to say, the space occupied by cars continues to bedevil urban dwellers as well as urban planners.
Carvalho’s analysis of the U.S. is acute. The dismantling of public transportation profited the auto and petroleum industries; driving became equated with a sense of freedom for minorities as well as whites. The interstate highway system “redistributed resources from cities to suburbs, reproducing social and racial hierarchies” while damaging the environment. Freeways “often entailed the destruction of compact urban communities,” with profound impact on Black neighborhoods. Planning czar Robert Mosses destroyed swaths of New York in the interest of car traffic while “implementing sinuous landscapes ink picturesque roads and parks for prosperous white suburbs.”
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Quoting from scholarly and literary sources in several languages, along with Bob Dylan and The Sex Pistols, Carvalho has written an entertaining, rambling account of select cities and an extended meditation on the history of futurism, a profession especially gifted with failure. He brings a well-read hipster’s perspective to a subject, urban planning, that usually implodes under the weight of bad writing and worse statistics. Carvalho’s tip for the future of cities? “We might do well to focus less on past versus future, left versus right, or even capitalism versus socialism, and more on walking versus driving.”
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