Metropolis
1927 · Fritz Lang
A vertical industrial city: the wealthy live above, workers operate the machinery below, and a robot can imitate a person.
Ends Up Here Podcast · Working research page
Research / In development
Who else
predicted the future?
Before we try to make a humane Metropolis, it is worth looking at the people who imagined tomorrow before us—and at the people their machines left behind.
Research questionWhen technology changes the city,
who gets to become more human?
who gets to become more human?
The correction
Arthur C. Clarke did not make Tomorrow’s World.
Tomorrow’s World was a BBC television programme, first broadcast in 1965, that demonstrated emerging inventions and asked viewers to imagine their practical future. The Clarke book you are remembering is Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (1962).
They belong together as part of a wider tradition, but they do different jobs: a film constructs a society; a futurist tests the limits of possibility; a television programme stages a prototype in front of ordinary viewers.
Working boundary: a prediction can be technically accurate and socially wrong, or technically wrong and culturally revealing. We need to score both.
The first canon
Things to Come
1936 · H. G. Wells / William Cameron Menzies
War and collapse give way to a rational, global, scientific civilisation—at the cost of warmth, pluralism and democratic ambiguity.
2001
1968 · Stanley Kubrick / Arthur C. Clarke
Tools, intelligence, space travel and machine error are treated as a long human trajectory rather than a single political order.
The later city
Blade Runner makes the hierarchy intimate.
Blade Runner (1982) inherits Metropolis’s vertical city but turns the question inward. The future is not only about who owns the factory; it is about who counts as a person when artificial beings can work, remember, desire and die.
Its forecast was uneven. Video calling, dense networked cities, corporate power and synthetic biology feel recognisable; flying cars and a fully convincing artificial person do not. The social insight may be stronger than the hardware prediction: technological progress does not automatically dissolve class, geography or exploitation.
Prediction against arrival
Vertical inequality
Global cities still distribute clean air, space, safety and attention unevenly. The exact skyline changes; the pattern survives.
Automation
Machines take over specific tasks, but people remain responsible for judgement, care, maintenance and the distribution of benefit.
Scientific government
Things to Come imagined knowledge replacing politics. In practice, technology becomes entangled with politics, markets, institutions and power.
Ubiquitous communication
Clarke’s broad confidence in communication, satellites and information moving across distance was more useful than a detailed date-by-date forecast.
Artificial people
The machine that looks human is no longer pure fantasy, but embodiment, agency, rights and emotional continuity remain unresolved.
Ordinary adaptation
Most futures under-describe repairers, carers, renters, children, disabled people, neighbours and the people who keep systems usable.
The Ends Up Here test
Make the future visual without making the people decorative.
The ambition here is not to copy Metropolis’s machinery or its hierarchy. It is to borrow the force of a visual future and reverse its moral direction: technology should be seen in the ordinary life it gives back.
So the next version of this project should show the worker, the child, the old person, the mechanic, the neighbour and the person who does not want to live in the centre of the city. It should show who maintains the abundance, who can refuse it, and who gets a quiet room.
Provisional thesis: a humane future is not one without systems or stratification. It is one where capability is widely distributed, essential systems are accountable, and no person’s humanity depends on occupying the top floor.
Podcast prompts
What did Metropolis see clearly about work?
Is the “head and hands” reconciliation enough?
When does a scientific future become a technocracy?
Which predictions were about machines, and which were about power?
What does an ordinary person gain—or lose—inside the future city?
What would a utopic Metropolis look like?
Sources checked · 3 September 2026
BFI on Metropolis · Criterion on Things to Come · BFI on Blade Runner · Arthur C. Clarke Foundation biography · BBC history of the 1960s.
This is a working research page. Film interpretation is editorial analysis; the prediction scorecard is provisional and should be tested against primary texts, production histories and contemporary evidence before recording.