Taking a Hint From Wise Young Heads : * If Three Junior High Students Can Design a City That Works, Why Can’t We Adults?

To realize the potential of the future, it is necessary first to envision it. Southern California, for one, has been built that way, by dreamers who understood that if you imagine it, maybe they will come.

After fire, earthquake and flood, the region is again poised at a crossroads, summoned by events and by its moment not only to affirm its future, but maybe even to reinvent some of it. And who better to engage in that kind of brainstorming, not only for this region but for the country at large, than today’s youngsters, the very people who will be there when tomorrow arrives?

Three eighth-graders from Bernardo Yorba Junior High School in Yorba Linda--Jacob Smith, Cory Jobst and Jeff Carroll, tackled a challenge posed by the National Engineers Week Future City Contest to propose an ideal city for the year 2195. Their effort, an 18-foot-square model of a city called Ancona, was selected over offerings by six other teams as the winner in the Future City Contest. It was created by using a computer game called “Sim City,� and then the boys created the model they showed the judges from their computer work. The model featured a working train system.

The youngsters not only proposed a city’s infrastructure, they addressed its soul as well. In an essay prepared for earlier regional competition, they talked about ways in which different cultures could live in harmony in their futuristic city.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros offered a welcome word of support for these efforts, encouraging the youngsters to further their education and use whatever engineering expertise they might develop for the future of their communities.

They deserve such plaudits for tapping the vigor and optimism of their youth, and applying their minds and hearts, to challenges of the future that are so daunting to so many of their elders.