I recently came across a piece of paper which described how the city of Seattle will (probably) look like in 2012; the message was hidden in a time capsule which was buried 50 years ago, in 1962. The first tackled problems are mortgages and loans:

Conventional bank loans—Up to 75% appraisal and up to 25 years. One of the more original boosters of the fair is R.C. Schiefelbein, Edmonds Realtor, who took 20 dozen neckties to a Chicago real-estate convention.

Architecture and planning was quite an issue even back then, but things haven’t gotten that much better since then. As always, rely on the ‘future people’ to solve your problems.

“I hope that urban housing problems can be better solved by more ingenious planning such as row houses, court plans, and the like rather than the conventional street pattern of individual lots,” Bumgardner said.Imaginative design can provide imaginative individuality in such scenes he said.

Also, they had some pretty big plans, believing that in the not-so-distant future, almost everybody will have at least one swimming pool.

here is one thing on which all executives of companies that make swimming pools agree, and that is that home-owners of the future will insist on having at least one pool included with the facilities of their home.

Real-estate salesmen showing a prospective customer through a home will point out the fact that it has two pools, much as today they remark on two baths. “At present,” William M. Smith of Pacific Pools said, “there are less than 10,000 private swimming pools in Greater Seattle. At the rate they are increasing I predict we will have 30,000 in about ten years.

About public transportation – Seattle seemed to have it all figured out… sort of.

The Seattle World’s Fair has a magic carpet.

The name is Monorail.

Zooming along at ta mile-a-minute speed, two Monorail trains will whisk passengers from downtown Seattle to the fairgrounds and return.

Fair officials are predicting the Monorail will be the exposition’s “main gate,” carrying perhaps 40 per cent of the paying customers. This is the world’s first full-scale rapid-transit system — both an attraction for the fair and perhaps a preview of the transportation of the future.

Sixten Holmquist, Alweg’s president, was also optimistic about the Monorail’s future as a rapid-transit system.

“This is the spark that could touch off a revolution in transportation,” Holmquist said.

Yeah, fifty years later, virtually any city in the world relies on a monorail for public transportation… sort of.

Seems like they had some pretty big plans and ideas for the future, but almost none of them truly worked out, which can only make us wonder, what will the future look like in 50 years ?