1939 General Motors' 'Futurama' Exhibit
In 1939 during the Great Depression, General Motors created a dynamic and positive vision of what America could be in 1960 – a highly mobile car‐centered society. The exhibit made such a deep impression that it has shaped urban development in the United States for the past 70 years.
The exhibit featured 330 individual moving seats that would take viewers around “the city of the future”. Their vision centered on the automobile as the ideal form of transportation and called for new zoning codes that would keep various uses separate from one another. The world was looking for something to positive to rally behind. Once WWWII was over, we mobilized to realize the future that GM showcased in their 1939 exhibit.
Now, in a different time with even more daunting challenges, America needs new hope and a new vision. The Future We Want (FWW) will use state‐of‐the‐art communications and web technology to give Americans a virtual experience of what life could be like in a sustainable society, including what President Obama calls a “clean energy economy”.
The FWW project was conceived at a meeting of 30 communications and
sustainable development experts hosted by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in the Spring of 2009. The project is facilitated by William Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project. The design team includes the Chicago Field Museum, Ken Snyder of PlaceMatters in Denver, CO. and Jonathan Arnold of Arnold Imaging in Kansas City, Mo.
