Washington's Wonderous World of Biotic Togetherness

This project plans to forecast the future of the 10,000 cities across the globe -- as though they have survived climate change and social discord and gone on to flourish anew. Today, we highlight the future of Washington, DC.

People in Washington, D.C. used to say the city was built on symbols. Over the next hundred years, it learned instead to live on relationships.

The change did not begin with a master plan. It began quietly, with small refusals. Refusals to widen roads. Refusals to hide streams in pipes again. Refusals to speak of trees as “infrastructure” or wetlands as “services.” The language itself softened first. City meetings stopped asking how nature could be managed and started asking how neighbors—human and otherwise—might live together in democratic consensus without exploitation or oppression.

By the 2030s, the National Mall was no longer a corridor to be crossed but a place to linger. Footpaths replaced asphalt in slow arcs that followed the habits of rainwater and the shade lines of old elms. Children learned where the ground stayed cool in summer and where frost came first in winter. The Potomac was no longer treated as a feature of background scenery or a just a hydraulic problem. It became a presence again—sometimes generous, sometimes demanding, always consulted.

This was never described as turning Washington into an ecosystem. That word had fallen out of favor. Too mechanical. Too neat. The city learned, slowly and sometimes awkwardly, to think of itself as a community: a gathering of individuals with their own tempos, vulnerabilities, and stubbornness. Trees were not carbon sinks. They were elders. Pollinators were not indicators. They were messengers. Buildings were not machines, but structures connected to work, life, and the environment.

Neighborhoods grew distinct ecological personalities. Capitol Hill became known for its seed libraries and its seasonal civic rituals, where policy debates paused for planting days and harvest walks. Along the Anacostia, soil restoration was inseparable from cultural repair, and people spoke openly about what had been buried and what needed time to return. Georgetown learned to live with the river’s moods rather than restraining them, adjusting its rhythms to floods and silts the way river towns once did.

As decades passed, the city aged without panic. Some buildings were allowed to soften, to host moss and birds before being reused or gently dismantled. Streets that once carried traffic became floral corridors, thick with scent and footfall. Governance expanded its sense of responsibility—not just to future voters, but to future trees, to migrating species, to children not yet born who would inherit both the promises and the mistakes of the present.

By the end of the century, Washington no longer called itself sustainable. That sounded too much like effort. People said instead that it was well-mannered. It listened before it acted. It remembered. It made room. The Capitol still stood, the Monument still rose into the sky, but they no longer dominated the landscape. They shared it, like long-established neighbors who had learned, finally, how to live among others.

The city did not function like a system. It behaved like an ecological and / or social community does: imperfectly, patchily, relationally, and alive -- in mosaic form.