The star of Just Imagine was the thirties movie's elaborate miniature of the city imagined fifty years in the future. It owes a lot to then prevailing principle of urban planning, the separation of people from the proliferating automobile, a tenet which was still being applied decades later by reviled city planner Robert Moses. "The city of the future should be a pedestrian's paradise with foot bridges crossing the traffic at each corner," wrote Modern Mechanics in a review of the scale model.