As Black Panther continues to smash box office records—its $242.1 million four-day opening weekend was the second-highest of all-time, as well as the biggest debut by an African-American director—it's also on track to become one of the most-talked-about sci-fi films ever among urbanists and city planners.

"Probably no movie has been more discussed in the context of utopian or dystopian city-making than 1982's Blade Runner,” urbanist and Vancouver’s former chief planner Brent Toderian tells Architectural Digest. “It’s still being discussed decades later. Blade Runner wasn’t a positive vision of Los Angeles, but it was an interesting vision. It was a cautionary tale, but also a fun conversation starter. I think Black Panther's Wakanda can be that new conversation.”

A lot of the buzz since the film's release has been around Wakanda, the movie's fictional East African nation, becoming a reality. Obviously, a Wakanda-like kingdom ruled by a monarch who has superpowers isn’t going to spring up out of nowhere, but urbanists and city-planning experts agree that some of the design and infrastructure of the fictional place have real-life possibilities.

In Wakanda’s capital city, for example, pedestrians walk along commerce-filled streets that are car-free except for the occasional appearance of small buslike shuttles. It’s quite similar to the Woonerf Concept, an approach to public space design started in the Netherlands in the 1970s. “It’s this idea that streets in the cities should be primarily devoted to pedestrians,” says Yonah Freemark, a PhD student in city planning at MIT who runs the transit website The Transport Politic.

And Wakanda, Freemark added, “inspires us to think differently about what we want our public spaces to look like. I think it’s quite possible to have streets in the United States look like this in the future. Maybe not the maglev trains that are in Black Panther, but you certainly can see streets becoming focused on people rather than cars, streets where people are just able to walk in the middle of them without the fear of being run over.” Halfway there, perhaps, is Manhattan’s High Line, an elevated park and walkway built on a former freight rail line on the city’s west side, running 1.45 miles from Gansevoort Street to W. 34th Street.