Friday Reflection: Imagined Futures
Bruno Carvalho on the difference between imagination and reality, unintended consequences, and social consequences
Throughlines
The conversation opens, as Bruno Carvalho’s book does, with catastrophe: the Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755. What appears, in retrospect, as a founding moment of modern urban planning is revealed instead as something far more contingent. The reconstruction of Lisbon was not the inevitable triumph of rational planners over medieval chaos, but the product of a singular political moment and a singular figure. Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo—later the Marquis of Pombal—seized the disaster as an opportunity to impose a secular, commercial, and future-oriented vision on a deeply religious city. Gridded streets, standardized buildings, anti-seismic techniques, and a central commercial square produced something startlingly new. To contemporaries, Lisbon looked like what one traveler called “a city of atheists.”
Yet, as Carvalho emphasizes, this transformation was neither smooth nor universally welcomed. Property was expropriated, aristocratic privilege curtailed, and resistance took religious as well as political forms. Irony piled high when Pombal deployed instruments of the Inquisition to crush opponents in the name of Enlightenment reform. Lisbon’s survival as a planned city, Carvalho argues, depended less on abstract ideas than on the presence of a strongman capable of enforcing them. Remove Pombal, and Lisbon almost certainly would have followed London’s post–Great Fire path: incremental change, softened by property rights and political caution.
From Lisbon, the conversation turns to a parallel—and often disconnected—history: how people imagined the urban future. Carvalho introduces eighteenth-century futurist texts such as Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440, wildly popular visions of rational cities, moral reform, and progress. These books circulated widely and shaped expectations, even as they failed to anticipate cultural change or human perversity. Such imaginings rarely translated directly into built form, but they furnished a vocabulary—regularity, improvement, order—that planners would repeatedly draw upon.
That tension comes into sharp focus in the discussion of straight lines and grids. From Renaissance notions of moral and geometric rectitude to the Manhattan Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, linearity promised rationality and control. Yet New York’s grid stands out precisely because of what it did not do. It assigned no functions, marked no civic centers, and dictated no hierarchy. In Carvalho’s telling, it was less a blueprint than a trellis—an “anti-plan plan” that managed change by refusing to prescribe outcomes. Its success lay in its openness, its capacity to absorb unanticipated technologies like the skyscraper, and its indifference to aesthetic completion.
The conversation then widens to the nineteenth century’s great planners—Haussmann in Paris, Cerdà in Barcelona, and Olmsted in the United States—figures who grasped that railroads, steam, and industrial scale had severed the past as a reliable guide to the future. Paris emerged as the global model, not because it solved urban life, but because it projected power, order, and monumentality with unprecedented confidence. Elsewhere, those ideas traveled unevenly. In Rio de Janeiro, Parisian reform meant sanitation and spectacle, but also displacement, inequality, and the beginnings of the favelas. Planning ideals proved exportable; their social consequences did not.
The final movement of the conversation confronts the twentieth century’s futures: garden cities, automobiles, Brasilia, Lagos. Again and again, Carvalho returns to indeterminacy. The triumph of the car was not inevitable; bicycles, streetcars, flight, and fantastical transport systems once seemed more plausible. Brasilia, imagined as an egalitarian city of the future, revealed the limits of technocratic design when confronted with migration, scale, and lived reality. Lagos, growing at a pace that defies precedent, underscores the impossibility of planning by analogy alone.
The discussion closes on a paradox. Cities have always attracted some of the most articulate critics of modern life. Yet their appeal endures. For all their failures, cities remain experiments in living among strangers—unfinished, unpredictable, and resistant to final design. That resistance, Carvalho suggests, may be their most enduring feature.
Questions for Reflection & Discussion
In what ways does the Lisbon earthquake illustrate the role of contingency rather than inevitability in urban planning history?
How important are individual political actors—like the Marquis of Pombal—in shaping cities, compared to structural forces such as economics or technology?
Why did London’s reconstruction after the Great Fire follow such a different path from Lisbon’s, despite similar opportunities for radical change?
How did eighteenth-century futurist literature shape expectations about cities, even when those visions were never realized?
What assumptions about morality and order lie behind the historical preference for straight lines and grids?
Why did the Manhattan grid succeed precisely because it avoided prescribing uses or meanings for space?
How did Paris come to function as a global model for cities, and what did other cities lose by trying to imitate it?
In what ways did planning ideals imported into Rio de Janeiro clash with local social and economic realities?
Why was the dominance of the automobile not inevitable, and what alternatives once seemed more promising?
What does the enduring appeal of cities suggest about human social life, despite centuries of anti-urban criticism?
For Further Investigation
Books
Bruno Carvalho, The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World
— Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro
Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century: The Lost Novel (Del Rey, 1997)
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward
Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow
Related Episodes
City of Light, City of Darkness: Michael Rapport on Paris in the Belle Époque
Madrid: Luke Stegeman on Power, History, and Spain’s Restless Capital
Prague, the Heart of Europe: Cynthia Paces on a millennium of history both at the center and on the periphery
Philadelphia: Paul Kahan on Diversity, Conflict, and Forgetting the Past in the City of Brotherly Love
Street Food: Charlie Taverner on street vendors, London, and the history of urban eating
If someone you know would enjoy thinking historically about cities, planning, and the future, feel free to share this Reflection with them.