Most of human history was static. It was the British physicist David Deutsch in his book "The Beginning of Infinity" who first made me understand that the idea one could invent the future would have been ridiculously foreign to people who repeated what their fathers had done, their grandfathers and so forth. 

That progress is both possible and desirable is perhaps the quintessential idea of the Enlightenment. (David Deutsch)

Bruno Carvalho, a Brazilian-American Harvard Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, African and African American Studies and Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative similarly picks the period of Enlightenment as the starting point for his history of the city and makes the concept of planning the future the central theme in recently published book. (The Invention of the Future - A History of Cities in the Modern World ) 

His observations begin in the middle of the 18th century, precisely the time when science, thinking and technology started to take off in what we now call the era of enlightenment. Unlike Deutsch, Carvalho is less interested in science than in art, architecture, planning, culture and their effects on cities as lived and imagined spaces. His particular angle is.......READ FULL ARTICLE HERE