Here is how I see American cities at the middle of the 21st century:

Because of high energy costs, living on large lots in the exurbs will no longer be affordable to the middle class. New policies will go into affect that support infill development in older city centers. As the populations of central cities grows again this will put a strain on already fragile infrastructure. Cities will begin rebuilding mass transit systems they ripped out long ago in favor of the car. People will still have cars but better mass transit along with walkable communities will make driving less mandatory and more affordable.

Gentrification has continued its insatiable march forward. Areas that were once hip are now populated by the middle classes with large new apartment buildings going up where fancy condos once were (and before that vacant lots and burned out buildings). Areas that are today considered the ghetto will be the new hip places where artists and YUPies mingle. The poor that once filled these streets will have been pushed further out into once middle class suburbs.

This will not have come easy. Much like the riots that flamed white flight in the 1960s, new class riots will erupt as the inner city poor feel the pressures of a society that they cannot afford to live in while being pushed out by much wealthier whites. Riots and demonstrations will ensue, and while the city will call calm and understanding, behind closed doors the elites will be helping move the poor out so real estate developers can move in.

This new rebirth of the city will mean that there will finally be political pressure put on restoring streetcars and building new subway lines. Because the poor will have been forced out into the suburbs, where rail service is few and far between, new Bus Rapid Transit lanes will appear on highways. Highways were once crushed with traffic can now afford to lose a lane for the only mass transit available for suburbs.

Suburbs will not die. Though the once urban poor will have moved in, many middle class and wealthy people will still be able to afford living there and will prefer it. Large lots will let people have small farms, usually tended by a local farm company so the residents don’t have to do the work themselves. Most suburbs will have created town centers, much like the old main streets, where residents can walk to. These centers will allow for bus and light rail transit to shuttle residents into the city or to a commuter rail station near by. Because of the class differences, gated communities will be the norm, even more than now.

The children who today are not yet born will become the artists that reclaim the abandoned edge cities of the future. Our massive malls today will be abandoned when energy costs make them unsustainable. Most will be left to decay as the suburbanity around them will be given up. As the inner cities looked to Americans in the 1970s and 1980s, so too will these edge cities look in the near future. But this is exactly the type of place young artists and rebels need to grow and create. Malls will become the new loft spaces. Communities will grow where consumers once walked past retail stores. The massive parking lots, already over grown, will be turned into collective farms. The large roofs will be used for water collection and solar energy. Malls, once symbols of everything wrong with the culture of mass consumption, will be turned into the very ideal of sustainable communities. This lays the ground work for the gentrification of the suburbs in the next 50 years.

High Speed Rail has replaced air travel as the preferred means of getting from cities that are close to one another. Air travel will still be available but will be supported by the government and will only fly long distances or in certain corridors with large amounts of traffic (i.e. Northeast Corridor). Many of the new rail lines will have been built, or are being built, along medians of highways since the land is already owned by the states and the rebuilding of central cities has meant land prices have increased to the point where eminent domain is not as affordable, nor as popular, and option.

While cleaning out my Google Maps directory I realized that I had a number of good maps that I had made at one point but never did anything with.

I’ve added a few maps of Unbuilt Highways;San Francisco, Washington DC, and Los Angeles, and Subways System Maps for Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco MUNI.

I am also going to figure out a good way to let people embed these maps on their websites. What’s a map good for if you can’t use it, right?

I’m currently rebuilding the site, moving a bunch of stuff around, condensing pages, etc. Please pardon the mess.

I finally got off my but and moved my Future MBTA to its own website: http://futurembta.com.

So what are my final thoughts on my trip to Boston? I left the city with a mix of feelings. On one hand I am happy the city looks so good, lots of new buildings and stores, neighborhoods cleaning up. Most of the people I met weren’t cold mass holes like I thought they would be. The T seems to be getting on the right track, finally. But something didn’t feel right. Maybe I am too used to New York, though, interestingly I didn’t miss New York at all while in Boston. Coming home didn’t feel like coming home, just like I was moving from point A to point B.

Boston was described by a geography friend of mine as a “baby city”. I’m sure no one in Boston would feel that way but coming from New York it is easy to see how you could look at Boston like a baby city. Boston was comfortable. It wasn’t noisy, the streets weren’t filled with a sea of people (in some places they were but it wasn’t a rush, more like a slow crawl where people were stopping to see the sights.) It was also clean, which I don’t think I would ever say had I not lived in New York. Or maybe that just speaks to how dirty New York is (it is, but that’s how we like it, isn’t it?)

I came up for the Geography Conference but only went to a couple of seminars and blew the whole thing off for most of the week. I really came up to hang out and walk around and that’s what I did. But I came to Boston with the idea in my head that I knew what I was doing with my life, that I had a path and I could see the end of it. I come back to New York questioning what it is I really want to do. I still want to do Urban Planning, I think, but the closer I come to graduation the less I know what that means. Maybe I just got a giant dose of academia and realized that that wasn’t what I wanted, though I think I already knew that.

I remember when I was a kid, I was totally obsessed with dinosaurs and I knew I wanted to be an archaeologist when I grew up. Soon that passed and what I wanted was to be was an astronaut. Space was my life. But then I grew out of that too. When I first went to college I went for Industrial Design, and though I don’t think I ever wanted to do that professionally, I knew design would play a big part in my life. I remember the day a professor recommended urban planning as a major, since I was very interested in the city and very much not interested in designing products. The more I learned about it the more I liked the idea. But always in the back of my head I remembered the times when I was truly passionate about something else, only to wake up one day and lose total interest. It scared me that this would happen again some day when it would actually matter. As a kid you can think you want to be whatever but when you grow up and need to find a job, having fleeting passions isn’t going to work out when you need to pay the bills.

But perhaps that was the problem, that Boston was my passion all along. I kept up the T website and would look longingly at maps of Boston, remembering the great times I had there and remembering how it sparked my interest in cities. Maybe going back was what I needed to realize that that was the wrong direction, that I left the city because there wasn’t anything there for me and there still isn’t. Maybe this is the city telling me to move forward, to focus on the new possibilities in New York and in greater cities still. Perhaps the reason I am so conflicted is because I was looking for something that wasn’t there, something that I only remember, and that may have not even really existed in the first place. I think I finally saw Boston as an outsider and it shook me up. Maybe this was the world’s way of saying keep your eye on the prize and don’t look back.

I remember walking down Centre St in JP to the Orange Line to get to Back Bay and I thought I heard someone call my name. I looked back but I didn’t see anyone, but as I was doing this an image of Lot’s wife flashed in front of my eyes as she looked back on her burning home, only to be instantly turned into a pillar of salt. I turned back around, thinking that if I kept looking back I too would transform into a pillar, a monument to all that I have left behind. I think that is the fatal flaw of Boston, that it recognizes and fetishists it’s past, looking back longingly to an era that was perceived as being greater, but in reality wasn’t. The city cannot get past the past, and that is something I cannot do.

Here is a map of all the places I walked last week, some with links to images I took on my Flickr page.