Washington 2025: We Hope Not
As futurists in Washington DC, we were struck by the Washington Post's article laying out scenarios for the region's future 17 years from now.
The two scenarios might be called "bad" and "worse":
- In the first, people are fearful and isolated, and the culture is deeply split by class.
- In the second, people are even more fearful and security-obsessed.
We don't want to be Tuesday morning quarterbacks, but my colleagues had these observations:
- Think positive. Scenarios give you the chance to lay out both the bad and the good outcomes, and use the latter to seek out desirable pathways. According to these scenarios, the future is bleak indeed.
- Most change is slow. To begin with, most of the buildings and transportation infrastructures of 2025 are already in place. Cities--outside of China at least--are not remade in a generation.
- Changes in values tend to be even slower. Will American values shift drastically in the next 17 years? It seems pretty unlikely, given that the decisionmakers of the 2020s are already in their thirties and forties, if not older. In other words, we already know about their values and attitudes in large part, barring drastic discontinuities.
- Consider what is inevitable. The author of this article says that the only point of consensus was that "the haves would have more," but that is a social choice, not a law of nature. Other societies have chosen differently, as have Americans in the past, and the pendulum may swing again before too long.
- More broadly, we get to choose the future. In a democratic, capitalist society, people can shift outcomes with votes and purchases. The people in these scenarios seemed beset by outcomes they would not have chosen. We can, I think, do better.
Image: Joey Gannon (Flickr)
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Posted on Tuesday, April 29, 2008
by
Josh Calder
in Cities, Futurism, Change
Josh Calder
in Cities, Futurism, Change
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