In Metropolis Mag different designers, urbanists, and city-dwellers describe how they envision the future (worst and best case scenario). Some are quite classical but other are interesting.

The future--from my limited perspective 21 ft. below sea level--is an artificial space protected from the encroaching seas, both literal and cultural. It threatens to flood the specifity of place by a system of design that defines the empty potential of human territory and the uses of historic forms to provide the building blocks for an unknowable future.(Aaron Betsky)

Besides, I like this story... hacking's the future (I mean 'hacking' as it was defined back in the days, when I was not even born).

An inventor in a little Brooklyn workshop hacks into a Blackberry handheld and discovers that, with a modification to the firmware, it can be redesigned to work for free within a short range. Working with a small upstate electronics manufacturer, this inventor makes a thousand of these mutant pagers and sells them through newsstands and bodegas in his neighborhood, and a free wireless community network is born. As the device becomes more popular, people in other neighborhoods and then other cities adopt them. A graduate student in Chicago gets one and sees an opportunity to add a couple of chips to the circuit, and she invents a new kind of free local voice message system.