'This is the year 1980, by now half the population of the United States is living in cities and towns that didn't even exist 20 years ago.'

Lots of threads colliding on this one.

First off, it's a 1961 documentary about what researchers and technocrats thought the future would be like. Postwar beliefs and  attitudes about progress and technology are a long-standing obsession here at the blog. As the title quote indicates, the program captures the era's schizophrenic optimism, the idea that if we could avoid nuclear Armageddon, we'd be unstoppable.

For an added touch of relevance, the show's first half is focused on the founding of Brasília.

Given that establishing new cities (or at least, commissioning CGI renderings of new cities) has recently come back into fashion among plutocrats and dictators, it's useful to see how the real thing was done.

"Big City" (1961)