Paul's House Diary

It’s tough to be an advocate for America’s cities in August 2025. With federal leadership dead set against forward-thinking, the impetus (and funding) just for things like infrastructure maintenance–an apolitical, table-stakes mission that creates jobs–is being casually (if not gleefully) thwarted. This is all happening alongside a freeze in federal support for scientific and cultural institutions that have made the United States’ metro areas the engines of our GDP, as well as the devastating, criminal humanitarian assault on immigrants that’s terrorizing neighborhoods across the country.

Strictly in the context of urban development, however, the successes of America’s cities–something that all Americans should be proud of and share in–are being impeded and reversed against all logic. 

This, unfortunately, makes reading books like Future Cities by Paul Dobraszczyk a bittersweet exercise. 

Future Cities takes on all of modern society’s cultural aspirations for urban life with an eye toward where we’ve landed today versus the prognostications of earlier visionaries, from turn-of-the-century illustrators and scientists to Steven Spielberg. Future Cities also looks to the future, weighing the possibility of cities in the sky, under the ocean, or land-based with a tinge of Blade Runner, the latter of which Dobraszczyk acknowledges may already be taking shape in metropolises across Asia. 

It’s a fantastic way to ground and contextualize the state of modern cities. Dobraszczyk references imagined realities that readers are readily (if not deeply) familiar with, providing a measure to understand where we’ve succeeded and failed in building modern cities, as well as where progressive science has helped evolve human understanding of what is possible and ‘best’ for our shared spaces. 

What’s frustrating about the book has very little to do with the content and most to do with the timing. 

We’re living in a moment where progressive ambitions are being ground to a halt. Politicians are encouraging a short-sighted and oversimplified divide between any person or institution with an intellectual, creative, or evidence-based mission and the priorities of federal leadership. 

To make it a little personal, this is especially true in Boston and the major metros across the United States, and it makes little sense in the grand scheme. When you map out not just where the country produces the most but also where the nation’s economic value is derived, it’s squarely and unequivocally in the urban metropolises that are (confoundingly) being punished for being environments that foster healthy economies. 

An obvious TL;DR: The government is shooting itself in the foot by targeting our own cities, the drivers of our national economy.

Another map that has been trending (at least on my Instagram feed) is a view of Massachusetts’ congressional districts that shows not only are there no Republican districts in the state, but every out-of-state district touching the Massachusetts border is also represented by Democrats. While many accounts have reshared a version of the post, they all roundly use the congressional map to emphasize that Massachusetts also has the best public education in the country, along with one of the highest GDPs and wealth distributions per capita of any state–the point being that “liberal” policies have been a net good, economically and socially. 

Rather than emulate the Massachusetts model, however, the current administration views the Commonwealth’s successes as an affront. 

This is all to say that while Future Cities was a great read to bone up on centuries’ worth of imagination and ambition for what our urban spaces could become, the book, which was only published in March 2025, already feels outdated.

We can all hope policies and politics change for the better. Still, at the current pace of urban regression that the federal government is pushing, many of the visions laid out in Future Cities feel even farther from reality than they did just one or two years ago. 

I don’t regret reading Future Cities–it’s well researched, engaging, and has enough pictures and illustrations to function as both a coffee table book and course text–but it’s not grounded in the current reality. On the one hand, that makes Future Cities pleasant for a distraction. When you check back into reality, however, it makes the shock of our current state of politics all the more painful for readers who live in America’s cities to bear.