This lecture has the rather portentous sounding title, ‘The Future of Australia’s Cities’. And yet, Professor Gleeson will say very little about the future state of Australia’s cities. The Grand Prediction is like the Grand National; the home province of mug punters. The pseudo-science of Futurology emerged in the 1960s offering new levels of enlightenment, but in reality rejecting reason in favour of alchemy. On closer inspection, the history of Futurology is like any other history: a chronicle of the unexpected and the all too predictable. Futurology burdens our social debates with feverish visions of looming cataclysms and imminent utopias that tell us more about the anxieties of the present than the verities of the future. The one real service of Futurology is to render the Human Prospect a subject for serious discussion.