Futurama Redux

Intoxicated by the automobile’s promise of freedom, modern society has become heavily car-dependent with severe side-effects.

But what if cars all but vanished from urban areas? This question is coming to the forefront of urban planning and policymaking as the effects of climate change, resource depletion, and urbanisation intensify. The automotive age is entering its twilight, but what comes after cars + oil? How will a changing relationship with energy redefine urban spaces and lifestyles? [r+d] post-carbon Vienna brings together a team of 20 designers to engage these very questions.

The name of the exhibition refers to GM’s “Futurama” exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, which was the first to lay out a comprehensive vision of a future redesigned for motor vehicles. Such bold, mobility-based utopian visions of the past are both sources of inspiration and cautionary tales, as they succeeded in uniting politicians, industry, and the general public while failing to consider the long-term impossibility of their proposed solutions. For [r+d] post-carbon Vienna, urban planners, transport planners & scientists, sociologists, climate scientists, energy specialists, and others were consulted and their expertise incorporated into the exhibition, which focuses on how a post-carbon urban mobility system might change our ways of moving, living, and thinking.

Mobility systems play a leading role in shaping the built environment and setting basic conditions for many social practices, and design has the ability to sway public opinion either for or against potential paradigm shifts. It was not an accident that the future world of 1960 depicted in the “Futurama” was in fact the future that we built. The great irony is that implementing the carsystem and infinite growth paradigm illustrated by the “Futurama” has made us both increasingly unsustainable and increasingly unsatisfied.

“Futurama Redux: Urban Mobility After Cars + Oil” asks how a transition to post-carbon urban mobility might foster sustainability, resilience, and security while improving quality of life. What role will design play and what must urban designers know to meet these challenges effectively? How can post-carbon urban mobility paradigms be communicated so as to gain the popular support necessary to make them politically feasible? And, ultimately, how can research + design help make tomorrow better than today?

until October 4, 2015
Future Urban Mobility
[r+d] post-carbon Vienna
Futurama Redux: Urban Mobility After Cars + Oil
curated by Joshua Grigsby and Florian Lorenz (Smarter Than Car)
Vienna Design Week 2015
Festivalzentrale Objekt 42
Absberggasse 27, Wien