Unrealized City Plans a Window on a Future That Would Not Be

Lynch, who switched from industrial design to urban planning in college, runs the Tumblr Hyperreal Cartography & The Unrealized City. His personal collection of hundreds of maps includes many postwar designs for American cities. “Of course, while a car for every home and a highway through every neighborhood seemed charming at the time, such an idea would make a modern urban planner shudder,” Joe Hanson writes. “One era’s Utopia is another’s hell.”

Lynch’s favorite images, collected on Wired’s "MapLab" blog, include a 1948 San Francisco highway plan, a 1945 design for the expansion of Boston’s subway, and a 1941 plan for the development of the area around the Capitol in Washington, D.C.