Enviro Fantasy: London in 2050

StrangeMaps – A Piccadilly Fantasy: London in 2050

So it’s 2010, and we’re not living on Mars, nor even zipping through the sky in flying cars. But neither do we have to bow to our new insect overlords. The promises (and threats) of the future never quite materialise how we once imagined them.

The current paradigm of futurism is of impending climatological doom – a secular, scientific eschatology with clear religious overtones, in the public’s mind replacing earlier concepts of nuclear Armageddon (and of course competing with the ‘original’, Biblical End Times).

That present-day environmentalist prism through which we view the future is illustrated nicely by this map of London in 2050. This Fantasy Piccadilly Line, by artist Nils Norman, is a variation on posters highlighting the tourist attractions above the actual Underground lines. This way of linking tube stations to the actual street plan of London is an interesting departure from the usual diagrammatic presentation of the Tube lines (i.e. the Harry Beck map).

Mr Norman’s map “shows a mixture of unrealised and fantastical buildings and systems alongside images of other artists’ proposals. The map presents a vision of London as an ecological haven inhabited by Utopian and Dystopian machinery as an alternative to the more typical view of a city dominated by tourist attractions.”

In the background are the North London Turbine Fields. A forest of wind turbines is also collectively known as a wind farm. Such farms are a popular method of creating energy in an environmentally responsible (non-carbon, renewable) way. Popular, that is, except with people near projected farms who often cite the visual impact as an objection to the projects.

Please read full at StrangeMaps

This map found as a pdf on this page of Thin Cities,