Here’s a striking (if rather depressing) quote attributed to city planner Victor Gruen, writing for Life magazine in 1959:

If the good life of the future is not to degenerate into a vast traffic jam and a strangled complex of cities, there is urgent need for immediate urban, regional, statewide and nationwide master planning.
The growth of the cities will not be an evil if we make them again a pleasant place to stroll, eat, shop, sightsee, enjoy cultural amenities, and live. Only then will our leisure time be worth living. Otherwise, we will spend our precious hard-earned leisure within our own four walls, cut off from society by the foes we have created: murderous traffic, smog, disorder, blight and ugliness. We will be trapped in our suburban or city homes, all dressed up with no place to go.

1959. Think of how much trouble we could’ve saved ourselves if we’d paid more attention to him way back then. Salt Lakers certainly could have; almost 50 years after those prophetic words, it seems like we’re struggling desperately to catch up in a race we didn’t know we were running, trying to figure out how to revitalize downtown and deal with traffic problems that just kind of happened while we weren’t looking. I get so frustrated at the collective short-sightedness of my community. We waste so much time shutting barn doors after the fact instead of just sitting down and doing a little thinking before we approve the building permits…

[Thanks to Leif Peng for the quote, and the great old illustrations of how the future used to look.]