Editing Crucible:Unity City (section)

== A City Of The Future ==

From its earliest years, Unity City cultivated a reputation as a forward-looking metropolis. Civic leaders embraced new transportation, new architecture, new communications systems, and new theories of urban planning. Where older cities hesitated, Unity City often volunteered to become the test case.

Airship terminals, elevated transit lines, automated traffic systems, electronic civic directories, early computer-assisted utilities, and eventually monorails became part of the city’s identity. The skyline mixed postwar modernism, civic monumentality, glass towers, public plazas, and streamlined transportation hubs. Unity City was the kind of place where a mayor could cut the ribbon on a new public technology and mean it.

This enthusiasm sometimes produced brilliance and sometimes produced expensive mistakes. Unity City has been home to elegant transit systems, disastrous pilot programs, miracle materials, failed urban-renewal schemes, remarkable public works, and more than one invention unveiled before anyone had finished reading the safety report. Even so, the city’s reputation endured. Unity City did not merely accept the future. It invited the future to dinner and offered it office space.