Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Sci-Fi Americas: Rewilding and Radical Urban Planning

Most intelligent people recognize that suburban sprawl is a blight. A lot of people also realize that walkable cities and well-planned communities would be a huge improvement on ghost malls, suburban slums and other hideous after-effects of developer greed and stupidity. Livable cities are the hallmark of a true civilization.

That being said, there are a lot of radical ideas out there that have the strong whiff of elite social engineering. This may or may not be one of them, but fitting the entire population of the US into a territory the size of New Hampshire seems a bit extreme, don't you think? But we're living in a time when plans are being drawn up to bulldoze any number of Rust Belt ghost towns back into farmlands. All bets are off.

We're also living at a time when it seems that the country is being goaded into disintegration, mainly through media shills rejiggering our political symbols and myths into social weapons. It could turn out that certain parts of the US could be radically transformed into sci-fi habitats surrounded by forest and farmland. Keep an eye out for signs of this in the days to come.

1 comments:

Michael said...

That's fascinating. Just yesterday we walked the dogs past a yard with a discrete new sign on it that declared it a "wildlife habitat" or some such, by the National Wildlife Federation. This was a fenced backyard with a lawn and a few trees, and the only wildlife would have been a few squirrels. Maybe they have a plan? BSG ding, ding, da ding, ding, ding opening music...

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