The Millennium: Future Sluggish or Future Shock?

By Jane Holtz Kay

"The future is hot," notes a philanthropy magazine. Or maybe it's not. Certainly, anyone reading The New York Times' article describing the lack of future thought in planning reservations et al for Anno Domini 2000 would feel the heat was turned low. Will everyone be under the covers when the ball drops in Times Square?

They will if my city has anything to say about it. Boston, the hub of the universe, has decided to celebrate the Big double M (Millennium Midnight) by being non-midnight owls. Our vintage city has chosen to follow Greenwich, England time where the century first turns. So we're packing it in at 7 p.m. Goodnight Mr. And Mrs. America and all the ships at sea.

Not that the rest of the U.S. of A is much more wired for millennial fireworks. In the months before the new century, no one appeared to want to trod the catwalk of tomorrow. Prophets and planners were few and far between and pronouncements strictly of the do-I-dare-to-eat-a-peach variety. In fact, the road to the Big Tomorrow has been empty. None of the familiar apocalyptic utterances. No bellringers. No gloommongers. No shrouded futurists in black looking to stoke the fires of Satan (or even South Park). Not even Toffler's old style Future Shock. Armageddon 2000 has been depressingly angst-free

Instead of messianic musing, what did we get? Planning (or fretting) about that high tech trauma known as Y2K.

Sure, looking out for Y2chaos makes sense. No one wants to lose their plane tickets or their lives. Heaven help us if the two million SUVs bought in the last year of the century die of thirst from an oil famine caused by low-tech layabouts in the Middle East. Still, this singular focus on a Bill Gatesway to "Y2K" is hardly a tribute to the philosophical or futuristic outlook of planners concerned with turning the fin de siecle corner into a model for a Brave New World. Just look at the letters "Y2K" and you can almost hear them buzz. Not the trendy kind of buzz. The creepy-crawly version visible in their insect-like look of Y2K. Hardly a noble image for a new century.

Yes, I know, planners have actually and literally been planning for the year 2000 plus for a while. Their documents bear the new numbers. The neatly etched script of the new century--all those 2020s on documents--fill the file drawers along with their forebears. Still, these numbers look pretty mundane, more like a license plate or television program than, say, Stanley Kubrick's "200l: A Space Odyssey."

In short: Shouldn't planners do better edging into a once in a lifetime occasion? Certainly, it behooves those of us who care about Tomorrowland to practice prescience as we edge onwards?

In behalf of said professionals, then, we have taken it upon ourselves to consult the great planning minds of the past. In the spirit of Edmund Morris, the Great Pretender and biographer of Dutch who lived a second life as Ronald Reagan's companion, thus participating in events he never lived,. we passed the long dark days of our youth, maturity, and old age with the said planning greats. A "high-dive bellyflop into the pools of Narcissus" Peggy Noonan put it in the Wall Street Journal.

Still, in the decades of our life, we had the good fortune to be at the side of many of these planning greats. We heard countless promises, portends and prescriptions for tomorrow while chauffeuring Robert Moses and Lewis Mumford (neither drove)…walking through Birkenhead and Fairsted in Brookline, Massachusetts, with "Uncle Fred" (Frederick Law Olmsted)…striding the Charles River in Cambridge with Charles Elliott….eating WPA alphabet soup with Harry Hopkins in the White House….gazing at imperial vistas with Daniel Burnham…painting Seaside's pretty pink exteriors with Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk…burning protest letters from Walter Kronkheit while helping Donald Trump sketch his 90-story east side tower…laying out the grid with Thomas Jefferson…the Garden City with Ebenezer Howard…the Radiant one with Corbusier, sipping Perier while peering at McDonald's with Baron Haussmann…New Towning with James Rouse….conceiving conurbation with Patrick Geddes, and neighborhoodization with Jane Jacobs.

And so, sifting through the vignettes gleaned from this tireless life as scribe and friend, we single out the following prescriptions, promises and portends of those we think the Holy Trinity:

Frederick Law Olmsted:
"We have duly noted that the landscape of America is replete with brownfields, venomous pools of noxious residues when all about are crying for refuge from the close-packed city. It behooves us to transform these urban sites into overlooks and islands of repose and contemplative scenery. Public Improvements abound for footpaths to cross the former industrial sites, and once-polluted basins to become pleasure-filled waterways nearer the centre of population.

It will be observed, that our plans will include roadways neither very straight nor very level and should be bordered by a small belt of trees and shrubbery so that a shaded pleasure drive by bike or foot will be free from the embarrassments which will inevitably be associated with a new-greenwrapped route to the 2lst century and shall connect and enhance the surrounding neighborhoods."

Le Corbusier:
"Entering this new century, nothing will have come of our dreams. Many of the expedients put forward to solve the traffic problem are doomed to failure because they are designed solely to relieve traffic and have no regard for the other functions of a street. Bien entendu. We will plan anew. Regulations meant to expedite the passage of traffic through a particular street, as by making it a one-way street or prohibiting parking; but at the same time it may destroy much of the street's value as a means of access to buildings fronting upon the street will be obliterated.

The problems of street congestion and of the evils which it produces will not be remedied by radiant cities of roadwrapped towers. I think back twenty years, when I was a student; the road belonged to us then; we sang in it and argued in it, while the horse-'bus swept calmly along. Tomorrow, in the Paris mist, we will do the same and we will call it traffic-calming."

Daniel Burnham:
"Post-industrial, post-war, post modern" -- these feeble proclamations of negativism, these weak utterings of a feeble century have no power to stir men's mind. Let us make no little plans. Ban them. We will make no little plans for the Brave New Century. Enough of New Urbanisms of little heft and less grandeur, a sufficiency of quibbling little quarters of grannyflats. Let us celebrate The American Scale.

"Our airports are too small; our roads too narrow. We must swing our new constructions across whole states, along continents and high to the starry skies with satellites that web us to a new Imperial City. Let us call upon our Walt Disneys and make theme parks and Celebration reign for the millennium."

And Carpe Diem in 2000.

Jane Holtz Kay will be spending her post-7 p.m. New Year's seancing with H. H. Richardson whose ghost hovers over Trinity Church, three blocks away from her Boston home. An edited version of this article appeared in Planning magazine, December 1999.

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