Post-industrial city

This illustration visualizes Phase I of futurist Eric Hunting’s seminal Living City paper, set in a near-future era immediately following the contraction and collapse of industrial society. With centralized institutions, states, and multinational corporations no longer capable of providing basic services or infrastructure, the burden of survival and reorganization falls entirely on local communities.

Rather than depicting a bleak, apocalyptic wasteland, the scene envisions the city as a crucial, hyper-active laboratory for societal experimentation. Cities are dense with human capital: they contain a massive concentration of diverse skills, specialized knowledge, tools, salvageable equipment, and architectural relics.

This is the dawn of the Jugaad, the era of radical DIY hacking, open-source improvisation, and grassroots collaboration. Individuals, neighborhoods, and decentralized networks are actively retrofitting the remnants of the old world to restore human agency and ecological life. The atmosphere is akin to a freshly ploughed field or a scorched forest: the old canopy is gone, but beneath the surface, resilient pioneering organisms are beginning to rise.

The outcome

Concept sketch

The final illustration