Where Did the Future Go?

Bruno Carvalho discusses the history of city planning and how urban design intertwines with a society’s prognostications and projections.

By Julien CrockettMay 29, 2026

• History

• Cultural Studies

This interview is part of The Rules We Live By, a series devoted to asking what it means to be a human living by an ever-evolving set of rules. The series is made up of conversations with those who dictate, think deeply about, and seek to bend or break the rules we live by.

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CITIES HAVE LONG BEEN places of possibility—places where it seemed that we could break from the past and create an entirely new future. As Bruno Carvalho observes in his new book, The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World, this mindset is a key feature of what it means to be “modern”—a sensibility toward the present and the future as it relates to the past.

Yet, as Carvalho’s wide-ranging history details, a break from the past does not assume a positive vision of the future. In fact, Carvalho begins his book with the question “Where did the future go?”—the title of a debate between the venture capitalist Peter Thiel and anthropologist David Graeber. Both imagine that the only cities of tomorrow are on Mars. When did our vision of the future become so constrained, tired, and even dystopic?

Carvalho’s book returns to a recurring paradox we have faced since the Enlightenment: the better our capacity for creation and prediction, the more limited our ability to imagine a new future. He marvels, though, that “we know some of what is coming: urbanization and climate change, life and death. Between all that, there is a lot of space for reinvention.”

In our conversation, we look to the past to help us think through what reinvention might look like and discuss what it means to plan for a radically different future. We also discuss the legacies of Silicon Valley, the construction of New York City, urban futures moving from the West across the Pacific, and whether Carvalho is optimistic about what’s to come.

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JULIEN CROCKETT: In The Invention of the Future, you write about how we have approached building cities and how that has changed over the years. You start the book in Lisbon in 1755 after a devastating earthquake. Why was this moment important? And how did it come to symbolize a change in terms of our relationship with the future?

BRUNO CARVALHO: Up until this moment, most people assumed the future was shaped by divine forces or cyclical patterns in nature. But around the time of the earthquake, more people stopped assuming that the future was fixed. They began to think of the future as something to be built, something that humans could shape.

The earthquake in Lisbon created an opportunity to rebuild one of the largest cities in Europe with these new ideas. Lisbon was an unlikely place for this to happen. It was part of a very religious society. But a particular state minister, the Marquis of Pombal, who had spent time in Vienna and London and was immersed in Enlightenment ideals, saw an opportunity to rebuild Lisbon as a more secular city. That’s the significant turning point: instead of rebuilding for a cosmic religious order, Pombal’s approach led to planning and designing for a worldly one.

One way he did this was by placing a commercial development at the center of the city’s grid rather than a cathedral or a royal palace. Trade was at the center of the city. They also used early anti-seismic technologies. The future was now more a part of natural history and less the result of being punished for being bad or rewarded for being good.

This was a way of applying the Enlightenment model to the rebuilding of Lisbon. To what extent was this the result of one person, Pombal?

History is massive and messy but this is one of those moments where an individual truly made a difference. The King of Portugal was terrified after the earthquake, and Pombal seized on the opportunity that the fear and uncertainty presented. There were five different plans for rebuilding the city and he arguably chose the most radically secular one. I write about lots of different turning points in the book where the explanations for change are more structural. In most cases, if you take away a prominent individual, more or less the same thing happens. However, in this case, without Pombal, you don’t get modern Lisbon.

You also write about how this change in mindset could be seen beyond city planning—it also appears in the stories we tell. One particularly interesting example is the French author Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s 1771 book The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One. You note that it was the first story about a utopia set in the future.

Right. Utopias were generally imagined as set somewhere else in space, like in Thomas More’s book Utopia (1516). But after Mercier’s book, it became common to have fictional accounts set in the future. And as with Mercier’s book, when writing about the future, you’re really writing about the present, or reflecting contemporary anxieties and desires. Mercier’s vision was very secular, and he thought the Paris of the future was going to be a productivist utopia, in a more peaceful world with trade and where slavery is abolished. French is, of course, the lingua franca. And although it’s a fictional world, Mercier is very invested in hyperefficient ways of organizing ourselves in a city. The Year 2440 became a bestseller that really tapped into emerging aspirations. I think the book was also successful partly because he found a way to criticize the present and criticize the excesses of the monarchy by projecting into the future.

Something that isn’t as explicit in my book, but that I’ve been thinking about more as I talk about it, is the tension between planning for efficiency and planning for experience. Present in Mercier’s books is this new mindset where you have rational tools through which to fix very concrete problems and increase efficiency. Mercier couldn’t yet perceive what the problems might be with these new outlooks, but they become central in fiction and various urban accounts that show how people don’t lead lives valuing efficiency as much as an economist or an engineer might assume. People are stranger than that: they fall in love, enjoy the sun or breeze, play pickup soccer, sit together for long meals. Often, what might seem like wasting time is actually what gives meaning to experience.

And that tension between efficiency and experience was not yet present in Mercier’s book.

Which is kind of my point. What fiction tells us about how people imagine the future really shifts over time. In Mercier’s book, the future is tightly bound with the more secular technocratic approach to planning, partly because the literary is still suffused, to a great extent, with religion and court culture. So, although Mercier’s book is a departure from the past, it doesn’t announce the future. If you fast-forward about 100 years, the role of fiction becomes very different. It eventually becomes a way through which to criticize the excesses of rationality.

The tension between efficiency and experience is still something we very much struggle with today.

Right. And it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. It’s just that we should not lose sight of the risks of overvaluing efficiency and underestimating the value of inefficiencies to experience.

To what extent is how we value one over the other cultural?

I’ve come to think we overestimate the extent to which culture is fixed, or downstream from certain “essences.” Rather a lot of our preferences or habits flow from land use. If you organize a city in a way in which the costs of chitchat are lower because it’s easier to get places—versus, say, Los Angeles, where the cost is higher because there’s just more friction to moving in space because of traffic—I think it changes your relationship to time and to interacting with others.

Haven’t we in some ways moved beyond land use, given digital spaces? One point you make toward the end of the book is that Silicon Valley hasn’t transformed the land around it like other places that experienced significant wealth accumulation. Why do you think that is?

The legacy of Silicon Valley is immensely consequential. And it is important to recognize how screens have changed our relationship to urban spaces. For example, our experiences of waiting for and riding a bus all change once you can access a smartphone. In a way, screens displace streets.

But part of the story of Silicon Valley is that, unlike past places that accumulated significant wealth, it isn’t as invested in physical space. Part of the reason is the very living legacies of anti-urban environmentalism in the Bay Area. This channels into NIMBYism, which has a very foolish theory of change in that it doesn’t accept change as a given. But you can’t escape change—and certainly not in cities. So, where you don’t change the built fabric, you’re getting a different kind of change, one that often benefits homeowning incumbents and makes it much harder for newcomers. And that is change too, right?

I want to move to the construction of a very different city, New York City, in the early 19th century. As you write, NYC became this “laboratory for social stratification, identity formation, and creativity.” But that wasn’t part of a plan or something anyone could have seen coming. How did NYC become an archetype of urban modernity?

This is another kind of accident. There were three New York commissioners who settled on a plan for New York City in 1811. And they were busy people who picked the easiest way to plan for growth by laying out a grid. It was an unintentionally radical plan. Grids are everywhere in urban history, but the Manhattan grid might be the first one that doesn’t assign functions to specific places. Looking at the New York grid you can’t tell where “power” resides: there is no spatial hierarchy. It ended up being an unintentional bet on a dynamic future.

One lesson from the story of New York is that the future is full of unknown unknowns. There were all of these unknowns on the horizon like the Erie Canal, railroads, shipping technologies, and developments in cast-iron and steel technologies that allowed for skyscrapers. By leaving the city open to these possibilities, it boomed.

During this time, there was also a large influx of immigrants from Europe to the United States. You write that one aspect that attracted people to the United States was the American mindset—that Americans didn’t love their country as it is, but as it will be. This really feeds into the mystique of the United States as the land of opportunity.

Yes, and that became an even more powerful story. Around that time, you started to have commercial steamships crossing the Atlantic, and the scale of mass migration took off. A lot of people made money and made lives that were worthwhile in the United States—and those people were often vocal about their stories. But the book is full of letters and oral histories that complicate this narrative. Many more people returned to the Old World than we tend to recognize, and others came and had their dreams deferred or crushed and then had to come to terms with futures that weren’t quite what they had crossed the Atlantic for.

Another feature that attracted people to the United States was the pace of change. As you write, although utopia in Mercier’s book The Year 2440 would take centuries, now, in the 19th and 20th centuries, “utopia” could arrive within a lifetime.

That is a crucial change for the experience of the city. To me, the 1870s were actually the most significant turning point in human history. It was when the past stopped being a yardstick for the future. We can understand every single change since then as a ripple effect: communications technologies, construction technologies, and mobility technologies changed the nature of what it means to be human. We went from carrier pigeons to the telegraph. That is a much more dramatic change than from telegraph to email. And similarly, from horses to trains, a more significant change than almost anything since.

Yet, starting in the 20th century, the modern city was no longer to be found in the West. Instead, the modern city was being built across the Pacific. Why?

World War I was a huge turning point. Narratives around large cities, particularly in Europe, began to change. Rather than the model of a modern city, Paris, for example, increasingly began to be seen as decadent.

The 1970s were another huge turning point, with the global oil shocks. Some East Asian and European countries, however, proved to be prescient by investing more in mass transit and going back to technologies of the past, like bicycles.

As we get closer to the present, I give an example in the book from the Spike Jonze movie Her, from 2013, which predicts a lot of the AI technologies we’re now living with. Although it is supposed to be set in a Los Angeles of the future, it is actually shot in Shanghai. And between the film being shot and today, Shanghai has grown something like four times—whereas L.A. has built maybe one skyscraper. It tells you a lot about how much of the urban energies and dynamism have moved toward the Pacific.

Did COVID-19 accelerate any trends you’ve noticed in urban development? Or have there been any lasting repercussions or lessons learned?

It’s probably still too early to tell, but just anecdotally, it’s striking how if you walk around a city like Madrid, you would never guess something like COVID-19 happened. Retail is full. Neighborhoods and streets are lively and thriving. Whereas in a lot of US cities, you have lingering effects like empty office space and struggling downtowns.

One lesson to take from the pandemic is that you can’t plan for unknown unknowns. But if you allow your city to adapt, it will be less vulnerable to changes that you can’t envision. So, if you have a city where you only zone for commercial use downtown, you’re going to pay a huge price for it when people work from home. A city like Madrid, which is much more mixed-use, can adapt to different needs as they arise. Same thing for varied housing stocks. Many cities have been vulnerable to changing family configurations, where families are smaller and there’s a need for more units even without population growth. If you have a variety of housing stock, and you allow markets to try to meet demand as it arises, that protects you from a seismic change like from COVID-19.

On the cultural side, when writing this book, I was also struck by how the Spanish flu did not become a huge part of culture in its aftermath despite having a big impact on city planning from a health perspective. I think COVID-19 is similar. You don’t see it in cultural production that much. It seems to be something that people would rather pretend never happened. Maybe it’s just that we cherish our ability to have futures and the pandemic was a moment where our futures became foreclosed very quickly and very unexpectedly. This is just a hard thing to come to terms with.

This ties into another theme in your book: the relationship between prognostication and the sense of control we have over our futures. The better our tools for prediction, the more we become aware of the lack of control we have over our futures, or at least over the possible futures we can hope to have. For example, you write about how our awareness of climate change impacted our perception of what futures we might actually be able to have.

There are lots of ways to think about this. I argue in the book that we should be humbler in how we think about the future. Rational approaches tend to underestimate the range of what’s possible, and it might be good to distinguish between possibility and probability. So, as our models have improved, we’ve become much better at seeing what’s ahead in terms of probability. We can reasonably predict the relationship between housing prices and rent, or traffic flows, or the weather.

But at the same time, we can only know what’s possible after it happens. The evolution of the term “data” is instructive. Data in antiquity was basically the past participle of the verb “to give.” So, it refers to things that are givens as we look back. Then, in the Enlightenment, it becomes “observed reality.” And in the 19th century, it becomes a tool to plan and predict the future, much as it is used now. Data is something that we collect, curate, filter, and use to try to look ahead. But data is still what it was in antiquity. It’s still definitionally “a known.” So our models allow us to see into a world of unknown knowns. But history really is the story of unknown unknowns.

The historian Jill Lepore has a related take on the transformation of the word “data”: she describes how “if you reorganize all of humanity around prediction, and yet people can’t actually undertake those predictions—those predictions are all offered by machines—we have returned, in a sense, to the age of mystery, because in an age of data, only computers can really know things.”

It’s foolish to trust anyone (or thing) who thinks they can predict the future, but that isn’t an argument that we shouldn’t try and use all the tools at our disposal. There is an exercise that I like to propose in classrooms and sometimes in bars. If you climb into a time machine and arrive at any moment in modern history and describe what lies ahead, you would be the first one to be laughed out of a room of serious people. Try going back to 2010 and telling people that Donald Trump is going to be a two-term president. Or try going to 1970s New York and showing people Sex and the City. The implausible happens over and over again in our personal lives and in history.

Are you optimistic about the city of the future?

If we imagine the city of the future as not that radically different from the city of the past, I think there are reasons to be optimistic. One of the lessons from the book is that sometimes the solutions of the past become the problems of the future. The car is a great example: it solves some problems, and it creates many other problems. Conversely, compact cities were a major problem from a health perspective, but they became solutions from an energy perspective. But right now, we’re in a moment that is just so unpredictable. We can’t even know what’s possible given the unknown unknowns. If you want to be an optimist, perhaps the current oil shock will promote a shift toward electrification.

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Bruno Carvalho is a professor at Harvard University, where he teaches courses on cities. He is the author of Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro (2013) and The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World (2026).