Future By Design

Browsing through an art based website the other day, I saw what looked like a very similar 'future city' to mine. So I clicked through to the Future By Design website, by a chap called Jacques Fresco. He is an artist and designer looking at a 'resource based economy' with a complete redesign of the world to his vision, of sleek interesting architecture and a Utopian society. He thinks seriously about creating a world in which people do not need to live by the sweat of their brow. Where crime and violence are eradicated and where computers build and maintain that world. Although his vision is similar to mine, particularly how he has laid out a city, with bands of functions, and central domes and integrated transportation etc, he doesn't discuss disaster protection and he doesn't really get to grips with the motivation of people to work or the fact that man's natural state is to work for reward - and work hard. But he is essentially joining me in discussing new ways to live, uncoupled from restrictive economic constraints and using architecture to deliver a better way of life. He has started an organisation to actually build this new world beginning with a university.

There is a documentary coming out on DVD called 'Future By Design' by award winning director William Gazecki. In it he describes Fresco as a modern day 'Da Vinci'. He's in his eighties now and has been studying and looking at the future for his whole career. I think anyone interested in how the future could be, if only we could get our act together, should make a visit to his site (link above). He discusses a resource based economy, which is something I have devoted quite some time thinking and writing about. But with diminishing resources I think that limitations on human activity via adequate and perhaps more strict resource allocation is on the way. But first the resources will go to the highest bidder, until people and their elected politicians have had enough and can see that this route will lead to uprisings and popular revolutions, which wouldn't help anyone. Proper resource allocation means abandoning economics as we know it. But as ever in world politics it will take a crisis to bring it about.

In the meantime people like me and Fresco will argue for a change. But both of us are jumping the gun. Only crisis tends to brings about change on a global scale, because human behaviour is very much limited to micro concerns and decisions, rather than the masses changing together. I think that's how things get done, how change occurs on a mass scale. Via crisis only. That's why the Russian Revolution happened the way it did, or the haulocaust, or the birth of the EU project after the end of the Second World War. For good or bad it is crisis, not planning that makes those big changes and pushes mankind to do things differently.