Episode 48: Cities of the Future

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This week Dave and Steel were joined once again by their old friend Spencer to discuss the perils and joys of home ownership, what cities of the future will look like, share some fantastic ideas for small talk (laying the heat when you next play Uno, gold-plated donuts, and Bigfoot hunting), share great music from Coldplay, Cake, Clem Snide, The Shins, The Fruit Bats, and Vajra, and Book Wisdom from Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace.

Links

Cities of the Future

• Futurama: The 1939 World’s Fair in NYC
  • Thanks to The Institute for the Future, you can become a foresight practitioner [just $4500 for governmental employees!]
  • A recent Wired Magazine Future of Cities feature. Highlights: pneumatic tube garbage cans, cable cars in Medellin, informal transit system in Nairobi.
  • The World Future Society [Futurist magazine]’s weirdly super-specific predictions. Highlights: Traffic congestion will increase by more than 30% in 18 U.S. cities by 2030 [topped by Raleigh, NC of all places!]; Biofuel-powered hypersonic jets will shuttle passengers between London & Tokyo in less than 2 ½ hours by 2050; Dubai’s airport will be the busiest in the world, serving over 75 million passengers annually by 2015.
  • BBC predictions. Living street lights, farm scrapers, robo-taxis, etc. Pretty sensible, really.
  • CNN predictions. Top 10 future engineering predictions: super deep basements, floating sea cities, High-rise or rooftop farms, 3D printed homes, buildings with their own micro climates, huge bridges that span entire cities, spaceports with easy access to the Moon / Mars, super high buildings — cities in the sky, underwater cities, collapsible / stackable living pods
  • Elon Musk’s Hyperloop
  • Technology Ages in Reverse. According to one view of the future, 500 years from now our cities are more likely to look like they did during the American Revolution than what they look like now.

Small Talk

• Some members of the Atlanta Hawks lay the heat with uno [Dave]
• The latest in NYC degustation: a $100 gold donut [Spencer]
  • Rick Dyer, the man who displayed ‘Hank’, the taxidermied ‘Bigfoot’ he hunted, shot and killed and then set up in a display case in his van, which he drove to Walmart parking lots around the country. [Steel]

Unchained Melodies: Old Buddy, Old Pal Edition

Book Wisdom

Spencer shared passages from Volume III, Part I, Chapter I of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.