Motherboard

In the 1950s in Brazil, badass architect Oscar Niemeyer was dreaming up what the future of the capital city might look like. Which, as it turned out, was sort of like the Jetsons crossed with Antoni Gaudi. Which, as it turned out, was super rad!

Around the same time a Detroit illustrator named Arthur Radebaugh began his incredibly popular syndicated—what? comic strip seems too small—column, “Closer Than We Think,” which also imagined how we might live one day. There were bubble homes and needle-nosed monorails and mailmen with jetpacks. Writing on the “Super-Metropolis Map of 1975,” Radebough said that the “’regional cities’ of tomorrow will be nearly continuous complexes of homes, business centers, factories, shops, and service places.”

Hey—good guessing!

He also envisioned “star-shaped” and “finger-shaped” cities and “satellite towns around a nucleus core.” (There is no indication that he meant this metaphorically and so as Detroit now raises its middle finger to the rest of the country, this doesn’t count.)

Both Niemeyer and Radebaugh maintained romantic, space age notions about the future of cities, at once heavily impacted by technology but also somehow pedestrian friendly. And there were, of course, other sorta touched visionaries who saw new ways forward. Buckminster Fuller comes to mind as an early futurist and green technology advocate, forever seeking to do more with less. His geodesic domes, designed to ameliorate a post-war domestic housing crises, were the architectural manifestations of this idea.

So how are we doing? Mostly not very good! Today’s larger domestic metropolises sag under the unseemly heft of outmoded infrastructure and aging, poorly planned transportation systems. Designs are often less than inspired.

But here and there are signs of hope. Vertical farming reflects the spirit of men like Niemeyer, Radebaugh, and Fuller. Citing foreboding stats that indicate that by 2050 about 80 percent of the world’s population will live in cities and that, worldwide, we are already using some 80 percent of available farmland, the Vertical Farm Project makes a compelling case for urban crops. Also–these farms look cool. And they produce organic crops. Everyone loves to eat organic crops!

Toward the end of this video, Niemeyer says two things that resonate with vertical farming advocates. We paraphrase: 1. Cities always change, yo. 2. Nature has a way of making them change, like, rightnow.

As we inch ever closer to the precipice of a global food crises, and harsh environments, as well as new economic realities, make traditional farming ever harder, it’s not difficult to see Niemeyer’s words pointing toward a future where farms share space with condos and office complexes.

Surely there are other ways that the spirit of the legendary Brazilian architect will be reflected in the surfaces of tomorrow’s structures. Right?

UPDATE: A couple of weeks ago President Obama got in on the sweet action of urban future dreaming, calling for the “reinvention of our cities.” And that means it’s totally cool now.