Gawker: Urbanography

How Blade Runner Predicted Modern Cities

Nick Denton — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 10:45:43 EDT

Oobject's latest gallery of modern buildings reinforces the reputation of Blade Runner as a visual template for modern cities. Ridley Scott's influential science fiction movie—based on a Philip K. Dick short story—imagined omnipresent video advertising and environmental collapse in the Los Angeles of 2019. It's both a relief and a disappointment that the movie's dystopian vision is more likely to be realized in Shanghai or Beijing than in America's increasingly quaint cities.

New York, 1980

Nick Denton — Wed, 28 May 2008 11:09:00 EDT

The star of Just Imagine was the thirties movie's elaborate miniature of the city imagined fifty years in the future. It owes a lot to then prevailing principle of urban planning, the separation of people from the proliferating automobile, a tenet which was still being applied decades later by reviled city planner Robert Moses. "The city of the future should be a pedestrian's paradise with foot bridges crossing the traffic at each corner," wrote Modern Mechanics in a review of the scale model.

Cities From Orbit

Nick Denton — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:13:59 EDT

For a shot of the Eastern Seaboard at night, looking like a glowing necklace, forward to 1:35 into the clip.