Fast Forward: The Twin Cities in 2058

What will the Twin Cities be like in fifty years? The question seems innocent enough. But as the physicist Niels Bohr once explained, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”

Albert Einstein dodged such questions altogether by theorizing that the future has already happened. Any distinction between past, present, and future is “only a stubbornly persistent illusion,” he said.

Yogi Berra came closest to nailing it when he observed, “The future isn’t what it used to be.”

Well, no, it’s not.

Had you fallen asleep in, say, the mid-1950s and awakened today, you’d be dumbfounded by the absence of jet-powered backpacks, personal helicopters, or robots performing household chores. Most of our technological marvels would seem underwhelming. Here we are, fifty years later, still driving gasoline-powered cars, still flying similar airplanes (a bit faster) out of similar airports, still stuck with radio, movies, and TV reruns of I Love Lucy. Except for the personal computer, cell phone, and cash machine, our technological advances would seem unremarkable.

Yet the social and cultural transformation would blow the socks clear off your feet. As Richard Florida points out in The Rise of the Creative Class, to see office workers in T-shirts and tattoos, women and nonwhites as bosses, gays out of the closet, smoking banished to the parking lot, two-martini lunches passé, sexual innuendo everywhere, ethnic jokes no longer funny—to absorb all of those changes would completely disorient any time-traveler from the 1950s. Yogi was right; the future isn’t what it used to be.

Of all the predictions that didn’t pan out, maybe the cruelest is the absence of labor-saving devices that were supposed to create a glut of leisure time. Instead, the treadmill seems ever more relentless. Americans are working harder and longer to piece together complex combinations of jobs. Writers today, for example, are also asked to be editors, typesetters, transmitters, librarians, photographers, videographers, graphic designers, ad sellers, and entrepreneurs. Technology, rather than allowing leisure, has raised the expectation for each worker to do more. That’s productivity. But it’s also the main reason for empty golf courses.

So it is with a dose of humility that any writer sets out to describe his city, its place in the world, and the lifestyles of its people fifty years hence. Armed only with the happy assurance that I won’t be around to be declared utterly wrong, I sought out the best counsel I could find—people grounded firmly in the present with an inclination to look ahead.

Before departing with those smart people on a bus tour of the future “Minneapolis Saint Paul,” it would be good to stipulate that our destiny cannot be separated from that of the rest of the world. Wars, famines, pandemics, or an asteroid striking the planet would change everything for everyone everywhere.

Even without such catastrophes, it’s fair to say that almost no one expects America to dominate the earth’s wealth and resources for the next fifty years as it has during the past fifty. The second half of the twentieth century was an extraordinary time unlikely to be repeated. Climate change, the end of cheap energy, the proliferation of massively destructive weapons, and the rise of consumerist economies in China and India cast a long shadow.

Whether under these circumstances America can continue to flourish with its ever-widening income disparities is one question to worry about. Another is the likelihood of ethical dilemmas arising from big advances in bioscience. Who gets to live to 150? Who can afford to live to 150? Or who really wants to live that long? Those questions and far scarier questions may be closer than we think, and the societal implications are huge.

It has become popular to expect that we’re in for it. Utopian thinking is out of fashion. Optimists are hard to find. That’s a curious turn, considering that, by historic measures, the world is in quite marvelous shape and humans have demonstrated an ability to overcome steep challenges.

Suburbia

For a glimpse of suburban life in the year 2058, I have arranged to meet our guide, Maya Diaz, at her home. Maya was born in St. Paul in 1988, which makes her seventy years old. She looks younger than that to me. Seventy is apparently the new forty. She has been, among many other things, a librarian, a health-food vendor, and a history professor at Macalester College. Nowadays, as part of Minnesota’s 200th statehood anniversary, she drives a tour bus and narrates our city’s story.

Maya lives in what was once a three-stall garage, but is now a tidy one-bedroom apartment attached to a large old home in the borough of Eden Prairie. Both the house and neighborhood are on the National Historic Register. As with most such houses, once called “McMansions,” Maya’s has been divided into several units. Her son and daughter-in-law, both in their forties, live on the main floor. Her granddaughter, boyfriend, and their baby live on the second floor. With economic stability a fading memory, extended families typically piece together a livelihood while sharing the same house, as was common in ethnic neighborhoods 150 years ago. This pattern is now especially popular among the professional and technical classes, whose income runs only from project to project.

The seeds of this so-called economy were sown early in the century. As described in the March 2008 edition of the cheeky journal n+1: “People with nothing but their labor to sell—and no buyers—eke out a precarious, unprotected existence in a kind of frenetic unemployment. So it is that there are people whom capitalism pretends to cherish by never letting them rest . . . [who] are pressed into the service of heaping up goods and opportunities for those who can hardly enjoy them—an arrangement the price of which is merely global warming.”

It is a sunny summer morning, but on the cool side—86 Fahrenheit, according to the readout on the inside brim of my hat. What’s noticeable as I pedal from the train station toward Maya’s house are the bumpy streets, the scarcity of trees, and the absence of lawns. Shaggy native grasses, golden in color, are now the primary landscape.

The historic houses, most of them built in the 1980s and many needing paint, have been retrofitted with shingles that store solar energy—just one component of a self-generation package that powers most homes. The electricity grid remains, but it’s reserved mostly for peak demands. The bulk of the heating and cooling is supplied by geothermal wells sunk beneath the prairie grasses.

Reliance on regional water and sewer systems has also been reduced, thanks to home units that store rainwater and recycle the cleanest wastewater for bathing, dishwashing, and even drinking. It’s smart to manage the use of natural water even though ours is some of the cheapest in the nation, which is a very big thing. Water has replaced oil as the world’s most valued commodity, and our abundant and relatively clean supply is one reason people from the drought-stricken Sunbelt have been flocking to Minneapolis Saint Paul in recent decades and why our economy has rebounded so nicely.

More about that later, because I’m now coasting up to Maya’s front door and climbing off my bike to greet her. She is tall and athletic with long, black hair (a genetic package is now available to alter hair color and to prevent baldness). She’s wearing a red knit polo shirt buttoned to the throat, khaki shorts, and black Converse All Stars. I take this to be a retro look. We drink iced tea while she explains the drill. We’ll make six stops on our tour, each with an eye toward explaining changes in our city over the past fifty years. Our second stop, the one at the University of Minnesota, may frighten us, Maya says, because we will begin to see the ethical dilemmas that science has delivered. Am I ready to go? I am.

She straps my bike onto the small electric car her family leases. On our way to the Eden Prairie train station, where the tour bus is parked, she talks about the dramatic changes to suburbia during her lifetime. Eden Prairie wasn’t hit so hard, she tells me. But it was tragic when people in more distant suburbs—places such as Waconia, Prior Lake, and East Bethel—had to walk away from their homes as oil supplies peaked, energy prices soared, and the market value of homes far from the city core plunged. For most people, the cost of living in deep suburbia couldn’t be sustained. Even some upscale communities were abandoned. Squatters, gangs, and drug dealers took over some subdivisions, stripping the houses bare. Three times the National Guard was dispatched.

Those unhappy times are behind us. As we’ll see on the tour, our city has become noticeably denser, especially in the central districts and suburban clusters. Farther out, many left-behind subdivisions have been razed to make way for specialty farms and greenhouses that supply authentic (not bioengineered) fruits and vegetables to restaurants and high-priced natural food markets.

Our arrival at the Eden Prairie light-rail station is disorienting to a time-traveler like me. Nowhere is there evidence that this was once a large regional shopping mall. The streets are now laid out in a traditional grid. A cluster of twenty-story buildings—a fix of offices, shops, and housing—forms a miniature downtown. We step out onto porous sidewalks lined with strips of tall grasses and rain gardens. We spot our tour group and shake hands all around. Maya says we’ll board our bus in half an hour. Until then, we have time to explore.

Judging by the faces we see on the street, I’d say we were in Southern California. Complexions and hair are darker than those of the Minnesotans of our memories. Facial features give hints of Asian and Hispanic backgrounds, but, as Maya tells us, racial and ethnic differences are no longer an obsession.

We step into a Ralph Lauren store, one of the few brands I recognize. The place is tiny. Maya tells us that this, like most stores, is a show room. We can finger the shirts and sweaters (they have a 1920s look), admire the colors, and be fitted by means of electronic imaging. We pay with a card, and the clothing is delivered to our homes or workplaces within two days. (I realize my card expired forty-eight years ago.)

Most consumer goods, including food, are purchased in a similar way, almost all of it online. People order groceries based on their genetic makeup. (There are thirty-four kinds of Cheerios, for example, formulated to meet various nutritional profiles.) People often cheat by ordering foods they like but that aren’t good for them. Processed and preserved foods are more popular than they were fifty years ago, largely because they cost less. People eat half the meat they did early in the century. Out-of-season fresh fruits and vegetables are pricey due to high shipping costs. We step briefly into an open-air market near the spot where our tour bus is parked. The market is loaded with beautiful tomatoes, potatoes, cabbages, and other items grown where exurban subdivisions once stood.

On the Road

Upon Maya’s urging (“Saddle up, time-travelers!”), we mop our brows and step eagerly into our air-cooled bus. It is powered by the compressed air stored in long narrow tanks that run along the roofline. The air drives the motor. Then it is piped into our compartment or out into the atmosphere, cooler and carbon free.

Our seats include a control panel and video display. Already commercial messages are bombarding us. Denny Hecker Jr. is selling an electric car called Concept Zoom. The Guthrie wants us to buy personal seat licenses. We can still save big money at Menards. Apparently, we are supposed to endure this cacophony while taking in the scenery and absorbing Maya’s information. She herself has begun our tour by reading a commercial message from the bus company.

Although it is midmorning, the streets and freeways are jammed, mostly with battery-powered commercial vehicles making deliveries. Private cars are in the minority. Maya explains that half of all commuters now take the train or bus or live close enough to walk or bike. Our trip runs roughly parallel to the Southwest Line, our city’s busiest rail corridor. Rail has not proven to be the sinister form of social engineering once imagined, she says, but a simple necessity. As we inch through traffic on Highway 169, Maya tells us that our bus’s owner is being electronically assessed a mileage charge to pay for the upkeep of the roads. The charge also calculates the amount of congestion our trip is causing at this particular time of day and charges for that too.

As we pick up speed, Maya slips into her history professor persona. “Everyone thinks they live in pivotal times,” she tells us. “Sometimes it’s actually true. I’m here to tell you that decisions made, and not made, in the early years of the twenty-first century—your time—were, indeed, important to how things turned out for our city.

“Historians now refer to those years—roughly 2001–15—as the ‘Big Sleep.’ After decades of prosperity during which Minnesota had risen from an average state to one of the wealthiest and most admired, it fell into smugness and complacency. Political leaders lacked imagination and courage. Corporate leaders were no longer bound by family and community loyalty and, consequently, focused on bottom lines and personal fortunes. Aging voters retreated to their patios and pretended to see nothing beyond their backyards.

“There was a great deal of denial at the time. But it’s clear now that Minnesota was rapidly losing its competitive edge. By 2008, the state had slipped behind the rest of the nation in job creation and had fallen out of the top ten in personal income. Infrastructure was crumbling. A major bridge actually fell down in 2007. The state was being out-hustled in research and development. As a percentage of gross state product, academic R & D investment slipped from twentieth to forty-third by the early years of the century. Consequently, big breakthroughs in bioscience research came from the coasts. San Diego, San Francisco, and Boston reaped the initial economic benefit while the Twin Cities watched from the sideline.”

Maya interrupts her monologue to give us a point of reference as we slip onto old I–394. We are passing the General Mills headquarters, she says, and in ten minutes we’ll be arriving at our first stop. The hazy skyline of downtown Minneapolis appears on the horizon. A slew of new towers seems to have been added.

Resuming her history lesson, Maya says that, back in the early part of the century, even our greatest advantage was fading: A motivated and educated work force was harder to find. As the first baby boomers retired, competent replacements were hard to find. Hispanics, like herself, as well as African Americans and immigrants from around the world made up a growing slice of the potential work force, and their success was vital to the success of our city. But they were failing at an alarming rate to graduate from high school or make it through college. Indeed, Minnesota ranked near the bottom in successfully educating “children of color.”

One reason was their relative economic and social disadvantage. In Minnesota, more than almost anyplace in the country, race and ethnicity were predictors of income. Whites tended to be well off. Blacks and Hispanics tended to be poor. African-American poverty, especially, seemed to persist from generation to generation. And it was less understood in those days that poverty was not just the absence of money, but the absence of the confidence and social skills needed to make a living. Many people had convinced themselves that they didn’t have a chance.

Minnesota had never had a geographically concentrated urban underclass, but seemed to be cultivating one in North Minneapolis in the early years of the century. It was sometimes said that the state’s 200 most influential households were located on the North Side—influential because those few households accounted for an overwhelming share of criminal activity and social welfare expense and seemed to spread a culture of despair far beyond their numbers, especially in the public schools.

Of three big areas that needed attention in those years, the most vital was human capital, especially the education and training of disadvantaged children. The other areas, Maya tells us, were infrastructure, especially transportation and water quality, and bioscience research, the kind that could generate private investment and new jobs. Also important was reinvestment in amenities—such as the arts, sports, and parks—as a way to keep talented people here and draw new talent from elsewhere. For years we had thought of ourselves as a “cut above” our surrounding states. If we allowed our quality of life to slip to the Midwestern average, what then would be the point of living here? That, Maya told us, was the essential question.

The main barrier to progress was a fierce disagreement over whether reinvestment should be public and mandatory (taxes) or private and voluntary (no new taxes). Lack of vision was another problem. In the public schools, kids were regimented to pass tests in order to learn the kinds of work patterns and ways of thinking needed for jobs that were disappearing in America. It was, as the writer Daniel Pink pointed out, a bit like teaching kids in 1970s Detroit to work in auto factories. Eventually, that dreadful pattern was broken here, as we will see at our first stop.

Downtown

Our bus glides to a halt in front of a historic brick warehouse in the North Loop district. As in Eden Prairie, we are disoriented. The building is of a familiar type. But many newer buildings, most of them residential, have sprouted in vacant spots. The once empty streets have been transformed into something that borders on lovely. Strips of tall prairie grass and trees line the sidewalks. Maya informs us that the newer trees have silicon leaves, allowing them to store solar energy and become street lighting at night. Children are among the numerous pedestrians. Apparently actual families are living here. Maya points down the street toward two landmarks. One is the historic Twins baseball park, now being renovated. The other, which we cannot see from our angle, is the adjacent Metro Center train station, which has become an important building.

As Maya explains, electric trains form not only the core of our city’s transit system, they’ve become the main mode for intercity trips of 500 miles or less. From this spot, we could board a train that would add cars at the Union Depot in St. Paul and race to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago in less than four hours. Our city still has an airport, but it lost its hub status to airline mergers and to the popularity of trains. Fuel costs have returned air travel to luxury status. People actually dress up to fly, Maya says. They serve meals on airplanes again.

She senses our discomfort with all of this. You shouldn’t conclude that civilization has regressed, she says. Yes, people live in smaller homes and their homes are closer together. No, they don’t drive their own cars nearly as much, nor do they fly as often. They don’t eat as much meat or as much fresh produce out of season as they once did. In all of those ways, life in 2058 has returned to a more traditional form. She’s lecturing us now, and quoting Shakespeare. All that glitters is not gold, she says. The extraordinary period from 1950 to 2020 was extravagant and could not be sustained. The way we were living wasn’t all that good for us. Life nowadays isn’t perfect, but, in many ways, it’s returned to normalcy and balance.

We grumble about her comments, but are beginning, perhaps, to grasp more clearly the future we’ve stumbled into. In any case, Maya asks us to concentrate on the significance of the old warehouse that stands before us. It’s a school of sorts and was one of several that broke the code and began showing measurable long-term progress in the education of disadvantaged children.

How? First she stipulates that the public system was doing a fine job for most kids—and still is. But in a society of widening disparities, it simply didn’t work for many kids from disorganized backgrounds, especially boys. They were not hard-wired to the regimented routine of sitting in neat rows and taking instruction from an adult authority figure. As an institution, the school in those days functioned as a kind of preprison.

But what happened in this building was remarkably different, Maya contends. Starting at age three, boys were assigned learning coaches to guide them in exploring their interests, mostly via next-generation computers. Kids had the run of the building and the nearby public library. Some pursued the mixing and producing of musical recordings, others the design of sports uniforms, others the repair of cars and machinery. Private sector partners moved equipment in and out of the building to match kids’ interests. Often the children taught one another.

The upshot was that when adults stopped dictating and started guiding, kids got interested in the progression of learning. An interest in scuba diving progressed to marine biology. An interest in baseball morphed into a passion for statistical analysis. Some kids never mastered grammar or algebra. Then again, they weren’t learning those things in the old system either. Here, at least, a spark of creativity was often ignited and many kids went on to become productive artisans, tradesmen, and lifelong learners.

This school was just one of many radical experiments launched not by the public education establishment but by parents, corporations, and nonprofit groups. The entire concept of “school” was redefined for many kids. Some, of course, were still left behind, their social deficits too steep to overcome. But many more than before made it through, and, according to Maya, no longer is it so easy to detect a person’s economic and social status by skin color.

That’s not to say poverty was erased or that danger disappeared from parts of our city. In the poorer suburbs, especially, people continue to endure crime, blight, and despair. Although race matters less these days, class disparities persist and are growing ever sharper in an economy that fails to provide much employment security. Advances in bioscience have exacerbated the socioeconomic gap. Wealthier people can choose a level of medical care and genetic advantage unavailable to the poor. Those issues supply heat to our politics, which can get very hot, indeed.

Our bus, on the move again, heads east past the old Hennepin–Minneapolis government complex, with its historic clock tower. Maya, smiling, tells us not to trust the clock for the correct time. Then she replaces the loop of commercials on our overhead screens with data about our city.

When she says “our city,” Maya is talking about a wider metro definition than we remember. The name “Minneapolis Saint Paul” refers to a twenty-county federation of hundreds of boroughs, of which the old central cities are merely the largest. They serve as our “brand name.” Our population, according to the screen, is estimated at 5.5 million. That means we’re the eighteenth-largest metropolitan place in the country. Two-thirds of us are white, making this still one of the nation’s palest cities. Our incomes are relatively high, ranking ninth among the twenty largest metropolitan places.

Government, Maya explains, is both larger and more intimate than we remember. The county and borough governments elect a mayor and an assembly to operate regional systems such as planning, transit, pubic safety, courts, water supply, open space, and so on. It’s an extension of the old Met Council from 1967 and the Regional Council of Mayors from 2005. Most government, however, happens at the neighborhood level, largely because people live and work closer together. State government is less important than it was, because the metro city has emerged as the main unit of national and international competition.

The University

Our bus passes the old headquarters of the Star Tribune newspaper, long deceased. Maya points out the Minnesota Lumberjacks’ football stadium on the old Metrodome site, where the Los Angeles Vikings played until 2013. Sports are still an important “glue” for the community, she says, despite their obvious flaws. The Lumberjacks held salaries down this year by hiring players on work release, she says with a straight face.

We cross the Mississippi River and enter the University of Minnesota. We stop to stretch our legs in what Maya describes as the Life Sciences Zone, which starts behind the newly domed Gophers stadium on the main campus and runs along a corridor to the St. Paul campus. When people ask what drives our economy, we generally talk about three things, Maya says, each made possible by the blending of computing and biology. The three are medical devices, custom foods, and biofuels.

You’d recognize some of the corporate names involved—Medtronic, Cargill, General Mills, Target, 3M, plus a lot of names you wouldn’t know. We’re here on campus because some of the basic research that underpins people’s livelihoods happens here. It’s not that Minnesota was in the forefront of research in the life sciences. It ranked poorly in venture capital deals. The state invested almost nothing in academic research and development. And, unlike in Silicon Valley or San Diego, there was almost no synergy between university scientists and industry because industry was sequestered in the suburbs. It was a bad arrangement. The region eventually got lucky because its plentiful supply of cheap water attracted people and industry and companies were positioned to take advantage of advances made elsewhere in medicine and agriculture.

Maya offers herself as an illustration. She has three devices implanted in her body. One employs biologic material to suppress the inflammatory proteins that cause pain in her arthritic lower back. Another monitors and controls her blood sugar level, making adjustments in real time. Still another enhances the hearing function of her left ear. (The device also allows her to listen to movies or other image displays that she can choose to play on her contact lenses—the iLENS. She jokes that she can’t play her movies while driving her bus, however. The insertion of entertainment into the body has become a controversial element in politics.)

The device industry is a huge driver of the local economy, although advances in genetic engineering threaten to make some devices unnecessary. Replacement organs—some grown from stem cells, most from synthetic biological “parts”—hit the market a decade ago amid immense controversy. Maya tells us that her husband died of kidney failure in 2051 rather than accept a bioengineered replacement. He was a devout Catholic and, along with many religious and nonreligious people, believed strongly that a line had been crossed in which humans ran the danger of becoming, essentially, posthuman. It was the same fear that Aldous Huxley wrote about in 1932’s Brave New World and that Francis Fukuyama warned of in 2003: bioengineered humans would scarcely notice their gradual disappearance as an authentic and, perhaps, divinely inspired species.

The economic, political, and moral conflict around these issues now consumes our public discourse, Maya tells us. She offers a series of questions for us to ponder: Who will pay the social and medical costs of longer life? How should the quality of extended life be judged? Should people have the authority to end their own lives? Should people be allowed to genetically enhance their children’s intelligence, attractiveness, sexual orientation, and other traits? Should drugs or gene therapy be allowed to alter the propensity for violence, crime, alcoholism, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other conditions? Is it OK to grow replacement organs for people? Is it moral to grow meat from animal tissue rather than from whole animals? These and similar questions make almost trivial the abortion debates of the early century. And they split apart families, churches, and political parties, which argue fiercely about government’s role in regulating the safety and scope of biotechnology.

One less controversial aspect important to our local economy is the customization of foods and drugs. People can be screened for their genetic tendencies for diseases. The likelihood of developing diabetes, colon cancer, and stomach ulcers can be predicted and particular nutrition, drug, or gene therapies assigned to offset the disease. One noticeable effect is that, by early century standards, people on the street seem remarkably slender. Obesity, Maya tells us, is in rapid decline. The state fair isn’t the festival of fat that it once was.

She’s now calling our names and distributing box lunches, which had been tailored to each of our nutritional needs in advance. We sit on a shady terrace alongside a classroom building. Considering Maya’s monologue on bioengineered food, we’re a bit squeamish about digging into our meals. Is this an actual roast beef sandwich or the product of some Frankenstein lab experiment? Maya reassures us only that our lunches have been tailored to the health profiles we laid out in questionnaires filled out last week. She tells us that our lunches are of gourmet quality and certified safe for time-travelers. This doesn’t soothe our notion that agriculture and food have changed profoundly. The trend has definitely moved away from the farmer and toward the bioengineered food factories springing up near the center of many cities.

Maya shifts the discussion to our state’s role in developing biofuels. Early efforts with corn and soybeans made no sense environmentally. But harvesting and converting prairie grasses and algae set the stage for the mass production of microorganisms to generate liquid fuel. A plentiful water supply has helped us “farm” large batches of the bacteria. And our city’s wastewater plants employ microbial fuel cells to generate electricity.

The Afternoon

Back in the bus, our route takes us through a once-exclusive suburban housing development and golf course that has been converted into a field of giant windmills. We then drive through a belt of shabby suburbs, where recent immigrants have settled in deteriorating frame houses built after the second world war. It’s clear that poverty has not been solved. By contrast, downtown St. Paul has the look of an upscale enclave of pricey shops and condos, with great views of the Mississippi River.

A few miles upstream, we stop briefly at a Porky’s Drive-In on West Seventh. This is a wildly popular chain, we are told, and quite expensive. Actual carhops on roller skates deliver hamburgers to drivers, who often rent gasoline-powered cars for the occasion. Since people don’t drive much, eating in a car seems wonderfully decadent. Maya tells us that we would be surprised by the time-of-day pricing most restaurants offer. A cup of coffee, for example, costs three times more in the high-demand morning hours than during the rest of the day.

Next on our tour is the airport, which is smaller than we remember and not as busy. The nearby Mall of America has been converted into one of the nation’s foremost retirement villages. Maya calls it a climate-controlled version of Florida, but without the heat, hurricanes, or scary bugs. The waiting list is twenty years. Most older people cannot afford such places, she says. Many live with children or grandchildren.

Our last stop is an emotional one for me. I’m not alone in admitting that Lake Harriet tugs at my heart, perhaps because it is layered with so many memories or is such a cozy meeting place between nature and the city that I love. Maya assures me that the lake remains a beloved spot. But I’m shocked when I see it.

As with other city lakes, Harriet struggled for years with algae blooms and odor problems as the climate grew warmer. Now swimmers are back and sailboats are again gliding past. The bandshell looks good, and I suddenly crave a soft-serve cone. Strollers, skaters, and cyclists still flock to the shores. But the vegetation has changed dramatically. Maya explains that insect and viral infestations killed most of the ash, maple, and spruce trees that once lined the lake, and that the now-frequent windstorms take a further toll, not only here, but throughout the city.

The region’s climate now resembles that of Kansas in 2008, and we have taken on its characteristics, she says. The loon is rarely seen in Minnesota, although it remains officially our state bird. The moose, along with most of the birch and pine forests, have moved north of the border. In the city, officials for a time gave up planting trees altogether, even around the famed Chain of Lakes. But thickets of short oaks, hawthorns, and fruit trees have taken hold, as have shrubs and prairie grasses. There’s less shade than I remember, and the city sky seems bigger than before.

Weather is still a hot topic, not only because the warm season lasts longer, but because the day-to-day climate is less stable. Storms are more frequent and violent. For this and other changes in our ecosystems, there’s a good deal of regret and anger at past generations—at people like us, Maya says—because we didn’t act to curb our carbon emissions. But that’s actually unfair, she says, because by the time we realized that climate change was a problem it was too late to prevent it. The real question should have been were we doing enough to prevent a catastrophe in the last half of the century?

Since 1980, the earth’s average temperature has risen about three degrees. If it goes up another degree, that’s a big problem, Maya says. At greatest risk are the low-lying coastal areas of south Asia and Africa, but parts of our Atlantic and Gulf Coasts could be flooded too.

Despite their problems, the people we observe seem uncommonly cheerful and polite compared to what we remember. We time-tourists remark on how well dressed people are—like out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel—and how engaged they are with one another. Maya explains that formality and politeness have become a fashion, conversation an art. Classical music, Shakespeare, art realism, and the Latin Mass have all made big comebacks, for example, not because people have turned into traditionalist cranks, but because they crave a sense of civilized order in a world that seems chaotic with rapid discovery, disparity, and uncertainty.

Even the heat of politics is bathed in a kind of false politeness. In addition, she says, people seem especially to value the human touch and personal experience, perhaps as a rebellion against the “synthetic” advances of the digital and biotechnical world. Authenticity as an idea carries a lot of weight, Maya tells us.

This has been an extraordinary day. Our time-traveling heads swim as we walk along the lakeshore trading impressions with one another and doubting our preparations for the changes ahead. Someone mentions Peter Howitt’s 1998 film Sliding Doors, in which Gwyneth Paltrow’s life splits into two alternative realities. She’s headed down the steps in a London tube station. In one version, she makes her train by barely squeezing between the sliding doors. In the other version, she slips slightly on the stairs and just misses her train. That one slip—that one moment—profoundly changes the rest of her life.

The same goes for cities. Some of what happened to Minneapolis–St. Paul in the first half of the twenty-first century was due to blind chance or to market forces out of our control. But most of our destiny was linked closely to our intentions. Minnesota learned in the 1960s and ’70s that it had to make extraordinary public investments in education and other areas to rise above surrounding states and overcome the handicaps of climate and remoteness. Then for a time early in the twenty-first century, the state lost its drive to compete and fell back toward average. Our region dialed down its ambitions. A slightly colder Omaha was good enough for a lot of people who measured success only by what they themselves achieved.

Only after losing a number of corporate headquarters, an airport hub, a beloved sports franchise, and a lot of jobs did we rediscover that we’re all in this together. Government spending couldn’t solve everything. But sound, targeted public investment was important for an often cold, remote place trying to prosper and compete.

Not every fight was won. Some children were left behind. Despite an improving economy, a talent for public/private collaboration, and a lively community spirit, our income and social disparities could not be entirely erased. But marginal progress was made. And eventually, as Minneapolis Saint Paul, we rejoined the high-quality tier of American cities. We did so by rediscovering the value of planning ahead. As the management consultant Alan Lakein once said, “Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.”

So, what must we do now? What must we do in 2008 to prepare for the best possible outcome in fifty years time?

Improving the life chances for disadvantaged children of color is surely near the top of the list. That means better education and training based on “whatever works,” no matter if it comes from the public schools or private efforts. It also means keeping college affordable.

It’s clear also that we must treat water as gold. Caring for the natural environment, especially water, will carry a big upside in the years ahead. Investing in a postpetroleum transportation system and other green technologies is another good bet. Finding a place for public-private synergy in bioscience research is a worthy project. Maintaining our arts and cultural attractions is important. Keeping talented people and attracting others from beyond the Upper Midwest is crucial to our growth and prosperity.

Has this bus ride into the future been preposterous? Perhaps. But failing to anticipate the future can’t be a viable strategy. The political scientist John M. Richardson Jr. said, “When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.”

We should be the kind of people who make it happen.

Steve Berg, former national correspondent and editorial writer for the Star Tribune, writes about urban affairs for, among others, MinnPost.

Forward Thinkers

Predictions from the visionaries whose take on the future formed our picture of life in 2058

John Adams
Associate dean, academics, Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota
As the velocity of technological change picks up, Adams sees a rocky road ahead for the Twin Cities unless it can improve the life chances for those left behind—namely disadvantaged children, many of color.

Speaking bluntly, Adams says one unfortunate aspect of ignorance is that “people don’t know that they don’t know anything.” One way to repair that tragic cycle is to revive vocational education, he suggests. Too many in K-12 push college while turning up their noses at training for jobs in the trades. There’s disdain for “useful work,” Adams laments. Pushing college on kids who shouldn’t be there exacerbates the dropout trend, he says. “Skill training is grossly undervalued.”

Adams, a widely regarded geographer who has thought deeply about Minnesota’s future, is less optimistic than many. He foresees bitter political fights in which the wealthy try desperately to keep from paying taxes intended to benefit those unlike themselves. “We have been extravagantly liberal because we were all alike,” he says, describing a bygone Minnesota. On another front, he agrees with Harvard’s Robert Putnam that diversity doesn’t produce instant value for communities but takes a period of wise investment and hard adjustment.

Joel Barker
Author, scholar, futurist
Barker suspects that fifty years from now the Twin Cities will look remarkably the same on the surface, but much different just beneath: Sewage will become an extremely precious resource that’s recycled; water will be too valuable to be used in toilets. Advances in telecommunication, materials, energy, and biotechnology will transform our lives, he predicts. Energy from geothermal technologies will eliminate high energy costs, greatly benefiting the economy. Already, cities such as Copenhagen, offer glimpses of a more eco-friendly future. Walking, cycling, and other low technologies will flourish, he says. We’ll eat less meat and be considerably thinner.

On politics, Barker thinks that voters will continue to reverse today’s “trickle-down” policies. “In nature, the elephants survive because of the ants, not the other way around,” he says. The biggest local challenges will be equitable education for all and adapting to a new climate. “Our strength is that Minnesotans are very good at collaboration,” he says, referring to an ability to cobble together public and private efforts.

Peter Bell
Chair, Metropolitan Council
Bell expects balanced growth in the metro region over the next half century: dense clusters of development as well as more low-density growth. The region may stretch from St. Cloud to Rochester, and might be governed by an elected board.

Ethnic diversity will grow significantly, he suspects, as Minnesota comes more to resemble the rest of the nation. In other ways—in income, educational achievement, and age—the state and metro area will slide toward the national mean. “I don’t think it’s inevitable, I just think it’s most likely.” Mass transit will grow in importance, although not to the level in big Eastern cities. Bell guesses that medical innovation, higher education, and the arts will be important economic draws.

Robert Elde
Dean, College of Biological Sciences, University of Minnesota
Elde’s fervent hope is for the emergence of a bioscience district along the corridor between the university’s Minneapolis and St. Paul campuses that would produce the kinds of face-to-face exchanges and other public/private synergies that help drive bioscience exploration and product development in leading states such as California and Massachusetts. He’s afraid, however, that a passive, low-key approach will leave Minnesota behind.

“Right now, we at the university don’t rub elbows with Cargill and Medtronic and the other big players,” he explains. “We need to fix that very soon or we’ll be bypassed.” Hundreds of biotech companies have sprung up around the University of California–San Diego, along with more than three-dozen private research institutes. That kind of critical mass has a big impact on a local economy and the pace of research and development in what Elde expects to be a mind-boggling period of advancement in the life sciences.

Thomas Fisher
Dean, College of Design, University of Minnesota
Fisher expects a revival for big cities and small towns while many suburban areas suffer decline. By 2050, the central cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul may again be as populous as they were in 1950. “We’ll be at the end of cheap oil, so low-density properties will be increasingly unsustainable,” Fisher says. Other predictions: Gasoline-powered cars will be rare as electric vehicles and mass transit take over; people will laugh at the thought that ethanol from corn was ever a good idea; a network of intercity high-speed electric rail lines will become the twenty-first century’s answer to the interstate highway system; air travel will be expensive and rare; food will be more local; and government will be both more regional and more neighborhood-oriented.

“We will live less extravagantly, but in ways that may be more fulfilling,” Fisher says. He sees an America that relies more on Western Hemisphere partners for trade, with our politics and economic system drifting northward in style and substance. “We’ll be a social democracy that’s not centralized—more like Canada.”

Tom Gillaspy
Minnesota state demographer
Gillaspy expects that by midcentury Minneapolis–St. Paul will be thought of as a “metroplex” that runs from St. Cloud to Rochester with a swing into Wisconsin. Clusters will be as evident as sprawl, he believes, as preferences shift from the classic suburban house to attached units with lower upkeep and closer proximity to jobs, shopping, medical care, and entertainment. One reason for the change will be a decline of parents-with-children households. Other reasons will include higher energy costs and an aging population. “People will be living twenty or thirty years after retirement if they can afford it,” Gillaspy predicts.

The region’s racial and ethnic complexion will change. Based on current school enrollment figures, he projects that nearly 40 percent of the metro will be “of color” by midcentury, making it still among the whitest of American places. Our overall prosperity, he says, will probably depend on whether we’re able to replace and expand the quality of the work force with competent, creative people.

Lawrence Jacobs
Director, Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota
Jacobs expects advances in computer technology and opinion analysis to allow the further customizing of politics toward the personal preferences of individual voters at any given moment. That means a direct, instant relationship between voters and politicians. Jacobs sees caucuses and door-to-door campaigning as relics. He sees inroads for direct democracy, with features like the initiative and referendum gaining ground. “Government will be influenced not just by a wired society but a kind of societal MRI,” he says.

In metro areas, municipal boundaries may melt away as cities share services and politics becomes both more local and regional. He expects the current obsession with race and ethnicity to be behind us. Among important issues will be biotechnology, energy, and the environment. “Water will be important,” he predicts. “If you’re downstream from Minnesota, we’ll have some leverage over you.”

Curtis Johnson
Consultant and writer
Minnesota became special in the latter half of the twentieth century because it “always fixed the roof before it leaked,” Johnson says. That means it acted proactively to enhance its natural environment, schools, arts, and other quality-of-life advantages. If Minnesota pulls back on that effort and becomes just another Midwestern state, as now seems possible, people will begin to question the reason for living here, he says. The challenge ahead, in the midst of big changes in climate, culture, and technology, is to get back to being distinctive again.

Johnson sees us at a turning point. Forty percent of our lakes are unfit for swimming and fishing, he notes. “If we can’t do better than that, we’ve got to look our grandchildren in the eye and apologize right now.” Among all challenges, motivating kids to learn—including those who fall behind and drop out or are bored in schools that are out of touch with their world—may be the most important. He is coauthor of a new book, Disrupting Class, which explains a new strategy of learning that reaches all kids.

Allen Levine
Dean, College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences, University of Minnesota
Quick, flexible and nimble—yet sensible. Levine uses those words to describe how the food industry must respond to a rapidly changing market in the coming half century. Biotechnology may forge a merger between food and medicine, he says. Food might become an important vehicle for delivering bioengineered treatments for diseases such as obesity and diabetes. And it may play a part in preventing specific illnesses. Levine expects that people will have genetic advisers who will provide profiles for the foods and treatments they need.

But tailored foods won’t come easily, he says. Customized diets will be tremendously complex to assemble because, as he explains, every action in the body has a reaction somewhere. Testing so many foods, in so many combinations, with so many preparations, under so many conditions, for so many different people . . . well, he says, “the variety is infinite.”

Stephen Oesterle
Senior vice president for medicine and technology, and chief medical officer, Medtronic
Stephen Oesterle spends much of his time working at the intersection of biologic therapy and medical devices—or what’s sometimes called the drug-device convergence. The aim is to design delivery vehicles for bioengineered medical treatments. Much of his work involves influencing a $1.3 billion R & D budget for the world’s largest device company and forging collaborations among private and public researchers, product engineers, and equity partners.

Oesterle says that Minneapolis–St. Paul has a good chance of flourishing in the biotech age, especially as biotech and device companies become more collaborative. “What we have that San Diego, San Francisco, and Boston don’t have is a device industry.” He thinks devices will be increasingly important for many palliative approaches in targeting and monitoring treatment, that in combination with biologics they may be potentially curative, and that whether worn or implanted, they will become important tools for everything from adjusting medical treatment to delivering, well, who knows? The evening news, perhaps. “We’re either going to be the steamroller on this or part of the road.”

Art Rolnick
Senior vice president and director of research, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
As a free market enthusiast, Rolnick thinks it’s unwise for Minnesota to invest in private ventures—like stadiums and R & D budgets. But he thinks it’s essential to invest in education, particularly early childhood learning. The quality of Minnesota’s workforce has been its strength for the last fifty years and offers the best bet for keeping our region competitive in the future, he says.

He’s optimistic about that—and about narrowing an income gap that he believes is not as wide as some suggest. He’s especially enthusiastic about the Saint Paul Early Childhood Scholarship & Parent Mentoring Program, an effort among immigrant families in the Frogtown and North End neighborhoods. “If we don’t keep our education success at a high level, we could lose our greatest advantage,” he says, “which is our human capital.”

Tom Stinson
Minnesota state economist
In fifty years, Stinson expects the metro economy to be even more dependent on services. Health care will be big, but not huge, he suspects, because major medical advances will succeed in making us healthier. Ethanol and other liquid biofuels will be on the way out as fuel cells take over. High shipping costs will force production of goods closer to markets. More shopping will be online. Standards of living for everyone will increase, but there will still be income disparities. Those are some of his projections.

How will Minnesota stack up in fifty years? That depends on what we do now, Stinson says. “By 2012 or 2015, we need to make key decisions that are going to affect where we are in 2030 to 2050.” Among them are decisions on whether to expand public investment in education, infrastructure, and research and development.

Deborah Swackhamer
Professor, environmental health sciences, and interim director, Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota
Asked how Minnesota will cope with climate change, Swackhamer says, “That depends on what we chose to do now.” Our carbon choices have already dictated an altered environment in 2050. But we still have a chance to lessen further damage in the 2050–2100 period, she says. She expects the state’s summer climate to resemble that of Kansas, and of Illinois in the winter by midcentury and that Minnesota will lose its emblematic pine forests, loons, and moose.

Caring for water quality and supply will be vital, she predicts. The smartest cities will organize their planning around environmental concerns. “Our big challenge will be learning how to think about the long term,” she says, “something we’ve not been very good at . . . . I’m not altogether sad that I won’t be around to see all this because no one is prepared for the scale of change that we’ll see.”

Sandra Vargas
President and CEO, The Minneapolis Foundation
Vargas believes that the metro’s future depends on making significant progress against its biggest problem: concentrated poverty and the low educational achievement that comes with it. White Minnesotans face a test unlike anything they’ve faced, she says. And that is whether to invest major amounts of public and private money in people who don’t look, or sometimes act, like themselves. Whether older white voters and business leaders will have the faith and foresight to help erase the region’s big educational achievement gap is the question that will determine the Twin Cities’ fate over the next half century.

“A lot of these kids may not come across as wanting or deserving our help,” Vargas says, “but when you really talk to them, their message is, ‘Don’t isolate us and don’t desert us.’” A common vision, she says, is needed among all people to educate all children.