What Is Progress City?
An introduction to this experimental multimedia project, chronicling 200 years of a fictitious US Midwestern powerhouse metropolis
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Progress City is an experimental multimedia storytelling project, done as a fun not-for-monetization hobby by Chicago book editor Jason Pettus, aka me. It tells 200 years of history of a fictitious US Midwestern powerhouse metropolis (those years being 1845 to 2045, allowing for a little science-fiction in this project), a city of three million that is much like and shares much history with such real places as Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Cincinnati and more. It specifically mirrors the real history of Chicago, the city where I've lived for the last 30 years, but as a funhouse mirror showing a lot of “what-ifs” that might've happened to the real city in an alternative reality. For one early example, Progress's first massive industry in the mid-1800s was supposedly fishing, instead of the meatpacking of Chicago, and therefore the first generation of immigrant millionaires in Progress were Scandinavians, versus the Germans and Poles of Chicago's meatpacking industry. (Above image: the Progress Central Business District, as seen from Lake Michigan looking eastward, back towards the rest of the metropolitan area. Image generated by AI.)
I let people pop into the Google Docs file where I'm very slowly writing this 200-year history in the form of a wiki, so please click over there to examine this project in detail. This blog exists to examine more focused sections of this history, talk about the making of this project, and especially to share the massive amount of AI-generated images I've been increasingly creating. I've been sharing these on my personal Mastodon account and getting people not into AI increasingly annoyed, which is why I decided to start this new blog devoted exclusively to the project, so those who are legitimately interested can voluntarily opt-in to all the dozens of images I share each month. (Above image: the John Muir National Forest, on the far southern outskirts of the metropolitan area. It has a tumultuous history, starting as a homeless tent city during the Great Recession, then turned into an alt-right militia compound during the late 2020s, then only after this group's failed revolution in 2028 turned into the main visitor's center and cabins for this brand-new national park, half a million acres devoted to hardcore hiking and camping wilderness experiences. Image generated with AI.)
The city is situated in a fake Midwestern state called Winnemac, which in this fictitious universe comprises southern Michigan, northern Indiana, and northwest Ohio. This state was actually first invented in the 1920s by real-life literary pioneer Sinclair Lewis (the first-ever American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature), so that he could write novels that brutally made fun of Midwesterners without him indicting any one particular real city. Progress is on the extreme west coast of the state, abutting Lake Michigan; it's only one hour by boat across to real-life Chicago, which in this fictitious universe has earned them the unofficial nickname of the “Lake Michigan Sister Cities.” Over on the other side of the state is Lewis's own Zenith, where he set many of his novels in the 1920s, which is supposed to exist right at the spot where the real-life Detroit does, and have a similar history of becoming large and rich because of the auto industry.
All images at this blog were generated using AI bots, for now through Google's free AI image generator, but eventually at Midjourney on a paid account once I get a little more serious about this project. I understand that there is controversy over using AI (as a book editor, I for example am passionately against AI bots that attempt to do creative writing), but I'm choosing to use AI here anyway because: 1) this is a free project to read and view, one I don't plan on monetizing; and 2) I very clearly present all these images and this entire blog as a fictional project, and am never once trying to pretend that any of these images are real. The images are generated over multiple iterations of prompt fine-tuning, a process very similar to a film director describing what they have in their head to a concept artist. (Above image: A 1910s apartment building, constructed in the “Turtle Bay Style” named after the neighborhood where it was invented and first showcased. An equal blend of Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Style and the delicate, surreal curves of European Art Nouveau, it was first created because of two architects from each community who were having a torrid affair in these years. Image generated with AI.)
Read the entire Progress City wiki as it currently exists at this GDoc address. Visit this blog's archives at write.as/tales-from-progress-city. Subscribe to new posts as emails from that page as well. Follow it via ActivityPub (for example, through Mastodon or Threads) at @tales-from-progress-city@write.as. Subscribe via RSS with the link write.as/tales-from-progress-city/feed/. You can contact me directly at ilikejason@gmail.com, and find my book-editing freelancer website at Pettus.rocks. I hope you enjoy exploring the intricate details of this fake but (hopefully) real-feeling city as much as I enjoy creating them. Let me leave you below with a few more AI images I've been generating of specific moments from Progress's history; I'll be writing about them all in detail as the first entries here at this blog after this introduction. Right-click on any image on this page and choose “open image in new tab” to see the full-sized version.
1850s image of Trout Alley, where the city's first major industry cropped up soon after its founding, a thriving fishing industry spearheaded by Scandinavian immigrants. Image generated with AI.
Progress's first-ever public transit line, taking urban denizens out to the wilderness of nearby Lake Winnemac beginning in the 1870s. Although Gilded Age millionaires had private mansions in this area too (here in modern times all converted to arts centers and other community organizations), the entire lakefront and most of its surrounding area was devoted to free public opportunities for swimming, boating, hiking and camping. The line was the brainchild of the idealistic “City Beautiful” pioneers of these years, many of them the children of the fleeing New England Transcendentalists and European Socialists who founded the city thirty years previously. The frisson between these Progressives and the amoral industrialists who actually financed their giant social projects has been a hallmark of the city from its beginning to now. Image generated with AI.
Another example of the Turtle Bay Style, this time from a Gilded Age mansion in the neighborhood. Reaching its height in the 1910s, it was a half-and-half mix of Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Style with the delicate, surreal curves of European Art Nouveau, first invented in the city's Turtle Bay neighborhood because of two architects from each community who were having a torrid affair in these years. Image generated with AI.
A decade later in the 1920s, the heavily Art Deco-influenced Emerald Coast neighborhood was developed next-door to Turtle Bay, the home of the city's burgeoning community of proto-science-fiction authors (the “Radio and Radium Crowd” as they would eventually become famously known). Here, the Emerald Coast Hotel, famously the site of a popular weekly live big-band radio show. Image generated with AI.
1947 and the end of World War Two saw the creation of Henry David Thoreau International Airport, a cutting-edge facility highlighting a very early version of Mid-Century Modernist architecture, including a monorail back and forth to the central city, kicking off what many consider the city's “Golden Age.” Images generated with AI.
The pinnacle of that Golden Age was reached in 1966, when the city hosted an incredibly popular World's Fair, including the central pavilion of “The Muses” seen here. Soon after, the city's inner slums would see a series of violent riots, not able to be controlled by a profoundly shrunken police force after the successful 1967 “Defund the Police” campaign. Image generated with AI.
By the 1970s, the squatters and political activists of these rioting slums had negotiated a peace with the city, and the establishment of “Haven Freecommunity,” modeled after the real-life Christiana Freetown of Copenhagen. Like their community, prostitution and drugs are legal in Haven, in Amsterdam style through shops called “coffeehouses,” through a special zoning designation the city has given the area that they call a “pink zone.” Image generated with AI.
Next door in Progress city proper, an artsy neighborhood of international restaurants, knick-knack shops, galleries and bars quickly grows in popularity, which the locals unofficially begin calling “The Purple Zone.” After a lithograph by a neighborhood artist becomes cultishly popular, the area also unofficially adopts a peacock as its mascot. Image generated with AI.
But by the 1990s, a newly revitalized city decided to officially recognize this informal designation as an official neighborhood, and even started hanging cheesy “Purple Pride” banners on the neighborhoods' lampposts. This was widely seen as an attempt by the city to cash in on gentrification, and viciously mocked. Image generated with AI. (Note that this part of the city's history is inspired by the real-life fate of Chicago's Boystown neighborhood.)
The city's revitalization kicked off a decade previous with the 1982 Olympics held there. Coming at the beginning of the Reagan years, it was seen by many as a way to shrug off the darkness of the countercultural era just concluded and take pride as a city again. Here, the Olympic Park's natatorium, with the main Ada Lovelace Stadium appearing in the background. Image generated with AI.
The mainstreaming of the Purple Zone coincided with the gentrification of the now abandoned Trout Alley neighborhood, after all the fisheries packed up in the 1970s to move to the brand-new intermodal facility in the far northern exurbs known as the McKinley Wharf Seafaring Complex. Starting in the late 1980s, the crumbling warehouses were taken over by “college rock” bands, as well as an early wave of cyberpunks, coders and LARPers who grew as quickly as northern California's real-life community in these same years; their late-night illegal raves and daytime hacking events eventually brought out the city's first startup tech community, in the early days of the Dot Com era (leading to the now famous phrase “Silicon Valley and Trout Alley” to describe the synergy between the two areas in these years). Of particular note is the Neptune Corporation, who started in these grimy alleys but eventually became a trillion-dollar company. Images generated with AI. (Note that much of this part of the city's history is inspired by the real-life events in Chicago's Wicker Park in the 1990s.)
During the Great Recession of the 2010s, a homeless tent city organically develops at the far southern edge of Progress's metropolitan area. Although it keeps the displaced out of sight of the urban residents, the area becomes a horrific nightmare of violent unmedicated schizophrenics, rampant drug abuse, and forced sex slavery. In 2018, an alt-right social media star records a notorious documentary at the site about the wretched living conditions, calling on fellow alt-right groups to come in and provide relief and infrastructure. Slowly over the next ten years, they would transform the space into a fully militarized compound called “Justice,” then in 2028 in conjunction with other alt-right groups would launch a doomed attack on the US government, one the Army fully knew about and viciously retaliated against during the single bloodiest day in American history (100,000 dead in 24 hours). After the chaos, the city decided to turn the old compound grounds into the brand-new John Muir National Forest mentioned at the beginning of this blog post. Images generated with AI.
And in a day-after-tomorrow future, in the 2030s Earth finally makes first contact with an alien species, the mysterious and vaguely threatening Navvix. Progress becomes the first Earth city to formally invite the aliens to establish a permanent consulate. The most notorious thing about the Navvix is their profound intolerance for sound compared to humans, a level we would consider just on the minimum edge of being understood. Their campus in the City Hall neighborhood is surrounded by a futuristic invisible barrier that lets people walk in and out, but keeps all sound out. If people within the space talk too loud, another futuristic technology instantly transports them out to the sidewalk just exterior of the sound barriers. Eventually the Navvix create an alien/human hybrid planned community in the far northern exurbs of the metropolitan area, complete with the planet's first-ever maglev train. Images generated with AI.