San Francisco Futurama: The City As It Could/Might/Should Be

With apologies to Anna Hibble, my esteemed Sweet Digs colleague, for encroaching on her territory, but I couldn’t resist sharing this visual feast with you today.

I discovered these wonderful posters, which offer a fantastical, mildly Utopian vision of a future San Francisco, via Geoff Manaugh at BldgBlog, a truly excellent site I always relish visiting.

They are the work of artists Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert who asked architects, city planners, and transportation engineers, “what would you do if you didn’t have to worry about budgets, bureaucracy, politics or physics?” As they describe it, ideas from these conversations were then “merged, developed and perhaps mildly exaggerated” by the pair to create a series of six posters for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s “Art on Market Street” program.

The posters are on display now at bus kiosks along Market Street. If you can’t see them in the flesh, it’s worth spending some time looking at (and reading) them in detail and in glorious full size here.

And if these images make you want to learn more about the city’s potential future(s), you can attend a panel discussion called “Urban Visions” led by the artist duo and presented by the San Francisco Arts Commission and Livable City. It’s on February 4th at the California College of the Arts.

More information can be had at the SFAC’s website.