Imagining Urban Futures Imagining Urbanfutures Cities in Science Fiction and What We Might Learn from Them
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Imagining Urban Futures imagining urbanfutures cities in science fiction and what we might learn from them carl abbott wesleyan university press middletown, connecticut Wesleyan University Press Middletown CT 06459 www.wesleyan.edu/wespress © 2016 Carl Abbott All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by April Leidig Typeset in Whitman by Copperline Book Services Hardcover isbn: 978-0-8195-7671-2 Ebook isbn: 978-0-8195-7672-9 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data available upon request. 5 4 3 2 1 Cover photo: Shutterstock. Image ID: 367966991. © Antiv. Contents vii Acknowledgments 1 introduction 19 one Techno City; or, Dude, Where’s My Aircar? 45 two Machines for Breathing 71 three Migratory Cities 93 four Utopia with Walls: The Carceral City 119 five Crabgrass Chaos 143 six Soylent Green Is People! Varieties of Urban Crisis 171 seven Keep Out, You Idiots! The Deserted City 191 eight Market and Mosaic 221 afterword Cities That Will Work 233 Notes 247 Notes on Sources 255 Index Acknowledgments like cities large and small — a good thing, since I’ve been studying and writing about their history for over forty years — while recognizing the challenges that urbanization and urban life can present. In a previous Ibook called Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West , I explored the ways in which American science fiction has adapted the di≠erent narratives that we have used to understand the English- speaking conquest and settlement of North America. This book is the complement and companion piece, an exploration of ways in which sci- ence fiction utilizes the stories that we tell about the mature societies and cultures that cities embody. I have received feedback from the Chicago Urban History Seminar held at the Chicago Historical Society. The Alternate Realities reading group at Portland State University, organized by Annabelle Dolidon and including Tony Wolk and Grace Dillon, has helped me think about di≠erent ways to approach speculative fiction. I also received welcome comments and advice from science fiction scholars Carol McGuirk and Rob Latham, historian Robert Fishman, and an outside reader for the Wesleyan University Press. A portion of the introduction appeared in the online journal Deletions and a portion of chapter 3 in the online maga - zine Clarkesworld. Imagining Urban Futures Winner of an Academy Award for special effects, the 1951 film When Worlds Collide is one of the most striking early examples of the disaster movie in which an external force lays low the cities of the Earth, in this case leaving only a handful of earthlings to escape in a highly streamlined rocket ship. Courtesy Paramount Pictures / Photofest © Paramount Pictures. Introduction othing says trouble like a city smashed to smithereens on screen. Meteors and earthquakes, tsunamis and glaciers, earthly mon- sters and alien invaders — moviegoers might think that the only Nthing science fiction does with cities is demolish them with big- budget special e≠ects. Giant waves crash over New York in Deluge (1933) and When Worlds Collide (1951), an asteroid pulverizes it in Deep Impact (1998), and ice crushes it in The Day after Tomorrow (2004). Everyone knows that the star of Godzilla: King of Monsters (1956) has it in for Tokyo. Los Angeles takes hits in Earthquake (1974) and Independence Day (1996), whose flying saucer bad guys also take out New York, Washington, and Paris, itself soon reobliterated in Armageddon (1998). Not to be outdone, screenwriters for 2012 (2009) devised a planetary cataclysm to eradicate Los Angeles, Washington, Rome, and every other city lower than Tibet. Look again and the picture is far more interesting. Cities certainly per- ish on the science fiction screen and page, but they also grow, thrive, and decline in complex and intriguing ways. Hit the science fiction section at your local library or used bookstore for the pure pleasure of browsing the covers. Among the exotic planetscapes, cosmic vistas, and battling starships are cities seen from above and below, from near and afar. Cit- ies soar in the distant view of foregrounded heroes and shelter beneath transparent domes like gigantic snow globes. Tiny humans and all man- ner of other creatures clog street corners and thread their way among the intricate towers, tunnels, sky bridges, wiring, and plumbing of the 2 imagining urban futures coming metropolis. Artists bathe their visions with the patina of fantasy or the shimmer of high tech. We — the majority of humankind — already live in an urban world and share an urban future. Cities are home to a majority of our planet’s pop- ulation, and they are gaining a greater edge over the countryside with each passing year. Sometime in the first decade of the present century, so far as demographers can calculate, more than half of humankind be- came city people. I wouldn’t bet on the exact date, but the world crossed the fifty–fifty threshold between city life and rural life in 2008, accord- ing to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social A≠airs. China passed the same milestone at the end of 2011, with an o∞cial count of 691 million city dwellers. By the end of the century, the world- wide ratio of city to country is likely to be three to one or even four to one, the balance already reached in Western Europe and North America. Since our mundane future will be so decidedly urban, it is no surprise that the science fiction imagination has generated cities by the bucketful. Cities are background and setting for stories on and o≠ future Earth, often assumed as a natural part of coming society. They are sometimes an active part of the plot, places whose characteristics are essential to a story’s contests and conflicts. At times they become actors in their own right, intervening and shaping as well as framing the action. The future, the native land of science fiction, will be an urban future for all foresee- able generations. It’s like a syllogism: Science fiction is about the future. The human future will be urban. Therefore, science fiction should be about urban futures. Voyage outward from Earth. Settlers on the moon will likely live in underground cities — at least that’s what Larry Niven and Allen Steele propose. Martian pioneers will start o≠ in domed cities and then transi- tion to surface cities as terraforming takes e≠ect — at least as Kim Stan- ley Robinson has projected that planet’s future. On Venus cities will float in the thick atmosphere, says Pamela Sargent. Intrepid extraterrestrial homesteaders may hope to make new lives under new skies and stars, introduction 3 but they will need cities and towns to supply their tools and market their crops — at least that is how Robert Heinlein envisioned the future on Ganymede. And sometimes creative imaginations have run wild to fashion implausible superfantastic cities that are built into miles- deep canyon sides, that pierce the stratosphere like huge stalagmites, that raft together on the deep sea, that span huge chasms on vast platforms, that englobe entire planets, and that even disassemble and reassemble them- selves to creep across the landscape. Waive your berth on the next interstellar departure and you may still find yourself in the future of a present- day city. We can experience the e≠ects of climate change on Boston and Washington and economic stagnation on Los Angeles and Detroit. We can navigate an imagined megacity — super- high- rise Chicago or cybernetic Tokyo or hypertro- phied Shanghai. We can choose among dozens of di≠erent Londons and New Yorks and explore the rise of the Global South in future Bangkoks, Saigons, and Istanbuls where a few social or technological tweaks can lead to fascinatingly di≠erent cities. What is a city, by the way? With lots of small variations, historians and archaeologists agree that cities are big, long lasting, densely developed, and full of di≠erence — di≠erent types of people, jobs, neighborhoods, and economic activities.1 They are also points of exchange that influence people outside their boundaries. People come to cities to trade goods, services, ideas, and their own labor. More than anything else, a city is a device for making connections. It is a system for creating innovation and change, because the best way for any of us to come up with a new idea is to bring us in contact with strangers and their strange opinions. This is what Samuel R. Delany has in mind when he writes that “cities are fun precisely because they encourage encounters across class lines” and other social strata of race and sexuality. Putting it more concretely, says Delany, “There must be places where Capulets can regularly meet Montagues and fall in love.” 2 Deeper in time behind the last two centuries of exploding indus- trial urbanization are six thousand years when humans independently invented cities at least six times in what are now Egypt, Iraq, China, 4 imagining urban futures India- Pakistan, Mexico- Guatemala, and Peru. In fits and starts, as king- doms and empires flourished and fell, urban society spread gradually into di≠erent corners of the world — to Londinium and Angkor and Tim- buktu and Cahokia and Cuzco. Some cities have been so useful as to be invented and then reinvented multiple times, as with the Romes of Hadrian, the Medici popes, Mussolini, and Federico Fellini. Cities are a natural part of human society past and present . so it is not surprising that they are part of our near and far futures. So, sure, science fiction is about rocket ships and weird aliens and strange new worlds. It is about technologies possible and impossible — genetic engineering, cloning, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotech- nology .