THE INVENTION OF THE FUTURE

A history as well as a philosophical examination of humanity’s belief in progress and a better future as demonstrated in the spread of urbanization.

Carvalho, professor at Harvard, author of Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro, writes that just a few centuries ago everyone believed that divine forces governed the universe, everything worth knowing was known, and the future would resemble the past. Matters changed during the Renaissance. As a historian put it, “The future would be different from the past, and better, to boot.” By the mid-18th century, the expectation that humans had the capacity to make new futures and shape their own destinies had taken hold. Carvalho opens with the catastrophic 1755 Lisbon earthquake and tsunami and the subsequent rebuilding under autocratic guidance, partly frustrated (as usual) by property owners and tradition but which resulted in features heralding a new vision of progress: fewer monumental structures, wider streets (for fire prevention, not traffic), and an obsession with a grid layout as opposed to the old tangled pattern of streets. The iconic 1811 Manhattan grid established an even more radically modern relationship between planning and urban life: less religiously charged, and more open-ended. New York’s transformation in the 19th century exemplified transatlantic urbanization as a laboratory for social stratification, identity formation, and creativity. That was not part of the plan, but planners always underestimated how much cities would evolve within a few generations. Most readers recall the brutal Haussmann mid-19th-century transformation of Paris and L’Enfant’s dazzling 1791 plan for Washington D.C., but Carvalho, a Brazilian, pays more than usual attention to great South American cities as he delves into urbanization across the world from Delhi to Berlin to San Francisco and across Africa. Prediction is a mug’s game, so Carvalho confines his conclusion to heralding the long-delayed death of car worship and noting the movement of imaginative urban development to Asia.

Deep thinking about cities.