THE NAKED CITY – FUTURE SCHLOCK!
There’s been a lot of public discussion about innovation lately, spurred on by the sudden Turnbull coup, and promising all variety of technical whizbangery. A technological fast speed train is about to leave the station and if we don’t jump on now, we’re all going to be left way, way behind.
Ever since H.G. Wells thousands of novelists, filmmakers, comic book artists and futurologists have been predicting a brave new world in which scientific advancement totally revolutionizes our everyday lives. Some of it like The Jetsons and Star Wars seems totally fanciful, but other manifestations like driverless cars and buses appear only decades away – if you believe the boffins from Silicon Valley.
Foreseeing the future has always been a dicey process and invariably the soothsayers overstep the mark – even allowing for the usual poetic licence. You only have to look to Hollywood to see where reality has caught up with predictions made for the world in three or four decades later. When Ridley Scott made Blade Runner back in 1982, his dystopian vision of Los Angeles was years away in 2019. Today, that leaves only four years to get flying vehicles and replicants off the drawing board and into the mean streets of LA before the movie passes its use-by date.
Here in Sydney we seem to take the future with a large grain of salt, no real sense of foreboding and just a pragmatic acceptance that things are going to change – hopefully for the better but possibly also for the worse. At least the Sydney Town Hall has been earthquake-proofed and if the city suddenly collapses around it, we’ll still be able to check the time of day.
So what will Sydney look like in another fifty to a hundred years. No more cabbies and yes no more Uber drivers (ha, ha, ha) as a fleet of driverless cars shuttle us from point A to point B. Robots (aka replicants), you might expect, will be everywhere – from flipping burgers in Maccas to manning the 7-Elevens, 24 hours a day. Woollies at Town Hall will be long gone but the massive neo-Stalinist civic square that once sat directly opposite the Town will have also disappeared, replaced by a one hundred storey casino, controlled by the Packer dynasty.
Elsewhere the rampaging high rises will have spread like a cancer consuming whole suburbs like Woolloomooloo and Glebe and reducing green areas like Hyde Park and the Domain to the size of a bed sheet. Virtual parks, accessed by dedicated computerised glasses, will in fact replace all public recreational areas, saving a fortune on horticulture, and freeing up vast areas of public land for even higher high rise.
As in nearly all futuristic cities, the streets and freeways will become inexorably clogged and we’ll embrace the ‘skyways’ to facilitate everything from pizza deliveries to the Sydney sightseeing bus. The family drone will quickly replace the family car and it won’t be long before the aerial routes become inexorably clogged as well. Chances are we’ll then look to going underground as the city is criss-crossed by a subterranean maze of six lane motorways and motorised pedestrian walkways.
The chronic housing shortage will also force thousands underground as a new phenomenon appears; the ‘low rise’ – multi-storeyed apartment blocks descending hundreds of metres into the earth’s crust. Home to the city’s underclasses and public housing tenants, they will eventually lead to a new subgenus of Sydneysiders, the ‘mole people’, a group of cellar dwellers who almost never venture into the world above them – saving a fortune on UV cream and umbrellas in the process.
If it’s all a bit too much to take in, then ponder the words of American baseball player and homespun philosopher Yogi Berra and his immortal quote – “the future ain’t what it used to be”. We rest our case!
By Coffin Ed, Jay Katz and Miss Death
