Regional and Urban Design Committee

"Post Oil City - The History of the City's Future" is the title of an exhibit currently shown at theArchitecture Department of the University of the District of Columbia (UDC). Anybody who may wonder what the "history of the city's future" would be about will detect the answer quickly when strolling along the exhibit boards: Here we find neatly side by side many futuristic ideas of the past, and some of the presence. The one project really still in the future is Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. Even though Masdar supposedly represents the best of today, its luster oddly fades next to all these other ideas that now look at best quaint, at the worst ridiculous and almost always obsolete. In other words, the big ideas of the past are anything but futuristic from today's perspective, weather it is Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, the Futurama World Fair exhibit of New York or various personal transport systems and monorails that seemed to have been a favorite topic of futurists. In the exhibit announcement promises: "Though different in method and scope, the projects presented in "Post-Oil City" all have something in common: they exemplify the combination of reason, innovation, and flexibility that we'll need to make our cities and planet sustainable for the future,"