Let's All Move to Tulsa Metro!

Speaking of maps, here's a really interesting one I found on Paleo-Future.com, a cool blog about now-dated visions of the future. The map is from a feature called Closer Than We Think, a series of illustrations that ran in the several U.S. newspapers in the late 50s and early 60s.

The Super-Metropolis Map of 1975 was one edition that ran in 1961. It shows a projected map of the United States as it would appear 14 years into the future.

The map predicts that larger urban cores would morph into "super-metropolises" -- "regional cities" that are "nearly continuous complexes of homes, business centers, factories, shops and service places." It's a pretty spot-on prediction, of course (although I'm not sure you could make the argument that that actually happened by 1975).

Some of the predicted super-metropolis locales are pretty prescient as well -- especially Phoenix and a pre-Disney Central Florida.

But the map is way off on a couple other predictions -- a metropolis around Tulsa?  A strip of mega development around Chattanooga?  An urban center in the Mississippi Delta?

And this:

They will be saved from traffic self-suffication by high speed transportation -- perhaps monorails that provide luxurious non-stop service between the inner centers of the supercities as well as links between the super-metropolises themselves.

Yeah...not so much.