Prophecies in the Present. Technology, Continuum, Climate in the Public Spaces of Extreme Cities

In this brief note we will reason about the present and future city, selecting some prophecies (writings, drawings and projects), elaborated from the early twentieth century, that more or less directly conditioned and influenced the collective imagination in the following decades, urging solutions for the realization of public spaces of some non European cities in climatic and territorial conditions of extreme character. Reflecting decades later, the chosen prophecies, elaborated from the impulse of social and cultural re-foundation, which exploded as a catastrophe in the First World War, led as contributed to the formation of an idea of the city and new modernity, combining figurations and images projected into the future, relating them to the myths and ideals of the recent and distant past (Primordial Values). The image of the future city, as well as in literature, was transmitted to the broad masses by the U.S. film industry, now reconsidered both as an atypical case of industrial archaeology (musealization of NASA and the Moon satellite as a military and economic asset) and because of the future opportunities that will come from the space economy.