Daily Life in 2050
Daily Life in 2050 New York: Vignettes from the Future by Ernesto Semбn
Story 1: Jeff does some shopping in a city whose GDP grew 18 per cent per year from 2045 to 2050
Scenario 1-A: Jeff makes his way to the mall via underground pathways. He has to meet his wife and buy some food and toys for his only child. They will then go to the open-air hologram theater in the Bronx. In 2050, the Bronx is the only area of the city that is still mostly open-air. The boom consumption of the last 20 years exhausted many natural resources as it grew along with GDP and waste production grew along with consumption. By 2040, private and public systems of recycling had completely collapsed. The attempt to slow down consumption triggered long recession periods, and the companies in charge of the city government refused to self-impose any regulations on production. Continuing economic growth has eliminated unemployment for the last two decades and the “champagne glass” effect produced the narrowest income gap in city history. Garbage and global heat turned into the worst societal threats and most of city life is now underground or under glass-like domed structures. There, neither natural resources nor natural products are available. Genetically modified food and cloned products are the basic diet, whereas healthy open spaces and food made out of animals and vegetables have become the most desired—and expensive—commodities of the city.
Scenario 1-B: Jeff lives in a house in Sunset Park and has not left Brooklyn for the last couple of years. He just made an electronic purchase of a new virtual environment for his wall-screen. No travel is necessary and home-based activities are promoted. He misses the trips that his parents used to tell him about, but he can’t take any now: regulation and the strict taxation system imposed in order to preserve natural resources after the peak of tourism during the first decade of the century combine with the fear of global warlords that control large parts of the air space and suppress civilian air travel. City growth is based on electronic consumption (which has allowed for an incredible acceleration in the rhythm of the economy) of non-contaminant, recyclable products. In the now mostly local life, GDP growth is largely based on a vast expansion of the advertisement sector and some of the technologies associated with it. The sedentary way of life developed over the last few decades has notably reduced the intense use of city infrastructure, and low-skill jobs are fewer than ever.
Scenario 1-C: During the normal weekly three-day weekend, Jeff likes to leave his home in a housing project in the Upper West side of Manhattan and go shopping on one of the avenues in the outskirts of the city, some 50 miles from home. Today he is going to buy some new furniture for his house, where he lives alone, as do most of the inhabitants of the city. Aside from playing soccer at the underground fields each week, going shopping is a typical way to spend the weekend, which has been extended to three days since 2028, when consumption and public investment became the engines of the economy. The housing project where Jeff lives is an example of this process: new technologies created a system of personalized, exchangeable modules that allowed the New York Affordable Housing Project to design new houses at low costs. Modules can be assembled in a basic infrastructure according to the demand of the household, whether they are a big family, various kinds of couples, people living alone, or multi-generational families. This massive public investment brought the city out of the long recession of the 2020s. At the same time, the improvement of living conditions among the working class increased labor productivity, allowing more time for leisure and, in doing so, fueling the leisure-service industry.
Scenario 1-D: Jeff leaves the suburbs once a week to visit the downtown areas that are safe. He goes to a 100-story shopping mall in Manhattan’s midtown, a normal-sized building in the city since technology was developed in 2019 that could build at a pace of two stories a day, up from one story every 2.5 days in 2002. Jeff has to buy some items for a family meeting on Friday. In addition to presents and clothes, he buys 10 portions of cocaine, which became a legal product in 2036. Following a worldwide trend, the years of the prohibition were left behind after a succession of scandals involving some of the biggest national banks. Today it is used as a matter of course at parties and family meetings as a social stimulant. After a brief period of crisis, the legalization led to an extraordinary risorgimento in Queens and South Brooklyn, where some of the basic know-how about production as well as commercialization were highly developed. The “Queens boom” triggered part of the recovery of the city and fueled the incredible growth of the late forties and the construction industry that absorbed the bulk of manual workers. Queens developed a new urbanization and registered some of the highest rates in quality of life in the nation. Queens’ security problems were resolved in 2037, when the borough’s authority closed access to non-residents. It was a drastic step adopted after the riots of two years before, when the residents of Wall Street—illegal squatters in that deteriorated neighborhood—attempted to attack some of Astoria’s richest buildings. Since then, there are biometric ID cards that connect the Safe Net of Neighborhoods that includes—among others—Queens, South Brooklyn, Westchester and Midtown. People living outside the Safe Net’s borders produce 75 per cent of the illegal economy (from organic vegetables at half price to entertainment devices to financial services on the black market) but have not been inside any Safe Net neighborhoods for the last 13 years.
Story 2
Story 1: Jeff does some shopping in a city whose GDP grew 18 per cent per year from 2045 to 2050
Scenario 1-A: Jeff makes his way to the mall via underground pathways. He has to meet his wife and buy some food and toys for his only child. They will then go to the open-air hologram theater in the Bronx. In 2050, the Bronx is the only area of the city that is still mostly open-air. The boom consumption of the last 20 years exhausted many natural resources as it grew along with GDP and waste production grew along with consumption. By 2040, private and public systems of recycling had completely collapsed. The attempt to slow down consumption triggered long recession periods, and the companies in charge of the city government refused to self-impose any regulations on production. Continuing economic growth has eliminated unemployment for the last two decades and the “champagne glass” effect produced the narrowest income gap in city history. Garbage and global heat turned into the worst societal threats and most of city life is now underground or under glass-like domed structures. There, neither natural resources nor natural products are available. Genetically modified food and cloned products are the basic diet, whereas healthy open spaces and food made out of animals and vegetables have become the most desired—and expensive—commodities of the city.
Scenario 1-B: Jeff lives in a house in Sunset Park and has not left Brooklyn for the last couple of years. He just made an electronic purchase of a new virtual environment for his wall-screen. No travel is necessary and home-based activities are promoted. He misses the trips that his parents used to tell him about, but he can’t take any now: regulation and the strict taxation system imposed in order to preserve natural resources after the peak of tourism during the first decade of the century combine with the fear of global warlords that control large parts of the air space and suppress civilian air travel. City growth is based on electronic consumption (which has allowed for an incredible acceleration in the rhythm of the economy) of non-contaminant, recyclable products. In the now mostly local life, GDP growth is largely based on a vast expansion of the advertisement sector and some of the technologies associated with it. The sedentary way of life developed over the last few decades has notably reduced the intense use of city infrastructure, and low-skill jobs are fewer than ever.
Scenario 1-C: During the normal weekly three-day weekend, Jeff likes to leave his home in a housing project in the Upper West side of Manhattan and go shopping on one of the avenues in the outskirts of the city, some 50 miles from home. Today he is going to buy some new furniture for his house, where he lives alone, as do most of the inhabitants of the city. Aside from playing soccer at the underground fields each week, going shopping is a typical way to spend the weekend, which has been extended to three days since 2028, when consumption and public investment became the engines of the economy. The housing project where Jeff lives is an example of this process: new technologies created a system of personalized, exchangeable modules that allowed the New York Affordable Housing Project to design new houses at low costs. Modules can be assembled in a basic infrastructure according to the demand of the household, whether they are a big family, various kinds of couples, people living alone, or multi-generational families. This massive public investment brought the city out of the long recession of the 2020s. At the same time, the improvement of living conditions among the working class increased labor productivity, allowing more time for leisure and, in doing so, fueling the leisure-service industry.
Scenario 1-D: Jeff leaves the suburbs once a week to visit the downtown areas that are safe. He goes to a 100-story shopping mall in Manhattan’s midtown, a normal-sized building in the city since technology was developed in 2019 that could build at a pace of two stories a day, up from one story every 2.5 days in 2002. Jeff has to buy some items for a family meeting on Friday. In addition to presents and clothes, he buys 10 portions of cocaine, which became a legal product in 2036. Following a worldwide trend, the years of the prohibition were left behind after a succession of scandals involving some of the biggest national banks. Today it is used as a matter of course at parties and family meetings as a social stimulant. After a brief period of crisis, the legalization led to an extraordinary risorgimento in Queens and South Brooklyn, where some of the basic know-how about production as well as commercialization were highly developed. The “Queens boom” triggered part of the recovery of the city and fueled the incredible growth of the late forties and the construction industry that absorbed the bulk of manual workers. Queens developed a new urbanization and registered some of the highest rates in quality of life in the nation. Queens’ security problems were resolved in 2037, when the borough’s authority closed access to non-residents. It was a drastic step adopted after the riots of two years before, when the residents of Wall Street—illegal squatters in that deteriorated neighborhood—attempted to attack some of Astoria’s richest buildings. Since then, there are biometric ID cards that connect the Safe Net of Neighborhoods that includes—among others—Queens, South Brooklyn, Westchester and Midtown. People living outside the Safe Net’s borders produce 75 per cent of the illegal economy (from organic vegetables at half price to entertainment devices to financial services on the black market) but have not been inside any Safe Net neighborhoods for the last 13 years.
Story 2
posted by AhMeT at 8:50 AM
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