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These utopian visions are all based on the assumption that the city is a potential embodiment of reason. These optimistic projections constitute a noble tradition and often give us images of great beauty. Tony Garnier in the first two decades of the twentieth century provided one of the most plausible of utopian visions. Garnier's drawings are incredibly beautiful, the industrial zones indeed make you want to work there; the residential zones make you want to live there. The whole project inspires you to submit to the subtle coercion of a community based on reason, seriousness, social virtues; you truly wish to come home in grime-ennobled dungarees, to bathe publicly, to dress and to go to an improving balletic entertainment or rational political debate and then to retire to your modest rent-controlled Deco-ish home in a trafficless piazza. There is certainly a temptation here; but it is too tidy too rational, ultimately far removed from the wickedness and selfishness of real human nature. It is, essentially a vision that could be feasible only if implemented by totalitarian means (or the most enormous act of philanthropy).

But of course the most interesting predicted cities are not the reasonable ones. Rather the ones that (reassuringly) reflect the irrationality, ostentation, vanity of the human spirit! For Mumford this was a dark picture. Basing his predictions on those of Geddes he predicted: Urban Devastation-Standardised Chaos-Palaeotechnic Inferno-Congestion Unlimited-Shapeless Gigantism…

But at the beginning of the century there had developed a tradition of frivolous prediction that may actually have been truer to the real future than than Mumford's lugubrious forecasts. There was a particular spate of prognostication around the year 1900. In the old prison building in Cape Town, now a museum, I hit on a meticulous painting made in around 1899 of a future Cape Town: piers, dirigibles, a tunnel through Table Mountain…a Garnier-style Opera House, aerial velocipedes, all the frou-frou of Belle Epoque Futurism. Elsewhere in the same museum, Capetown as a 30s artist somehow envisages it would be in 2000; thrilling silver towers, like a palisade, circling the mightier Table Mountain.

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