Imagining Urban Futures. Carl Abbott
science fiction writers of the 1930s and 1940s but also the boomer generation who grew up with those stories as part of their SF universe. Some readers and writers have since repudiated it, but others have recapitulated or incorporated it into new work. The choices that designer Syd Mead made for Blade Runner very explicitly invert the techno-utopianism of Hugh Ferriss. William Gibson’s early story “The Gernsback Continuum” from 1981 is both homage and critique of the visions of golden age science fiction. Its gentle satire posits an alternative history in which the world of the pulp covers breaks through into “reality,” providing fleeting visions of cars like an “aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rudder jutting up from its spine” and a city that mirrors that in Metropolis: “Spire after spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations…. Roads of crystal soared between the spires…. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things … mile long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters” (8–9). Gary Westfahl comments that the story “pays fond tribute to the now-quaint prophecies of science fiction writers and futurists of the 1920s and 1930s, and ponders how their visions still influence residents of the future they failed to predict.”15
The exaggeration of these already larger-than-life buildings can authenticate otherness, as in thousands of drawings and paintings of future cities, but it can also call the whole idea of a bright urban future into question. In The Futurological Congress (1971; translated 1974) the brilliant Polish writer Stanislaw Lem sends his recurring character Ijon Tichy to a scientific meeting held at the Costa Rica Hilton, which rears 164 stories into the sky and offers bomb-free rooms and the luxury of an “all-girl orchestra [that] played Bach while performing a cleverly choreographed striptease.” At the meeting, convened to address seven world crises (urban, ecology, air pollution, energy, food, military, political), a Japanese delegate presents plans for the housing of the future: “eight hundred levels with maternity wards, nurseries, schools, shops, museums, zoos, theaters, skating rinks and crematoriums … intoxication chambers as well as sobering tanks, special gymnasiums for group sex (an indication of the progressive attitude of the architects), and catacombs for nonconformist subculture communities” (21). Seventeen cubic kilometers in volume, the completely self-contained building would reach from the ocean bed to the stratosphere. A scale model was already at work recycling all its waste products into food. The outcome of techno city may not be techno utopia, says Lem; it may be artificial bananas, ersatz wine, and synthetic cocktail sausages.
CHAPTER TWO
MACHINES FOR BREATHING
South Colony was arranged like a wheel. The administration building was the hub; tunnels ran out from it in all directions and buildings were placed over them…. Each was a hemispherical bubble of silicone plastic, processed from the soil of Mars and blown on the spot.—Robert Heinlein, Red Planet (1949)
“More money, more freedom, more air.”—Total Recall (1990)
Deep Space Nine is a space station. Hovering over the planet Bajor, it monitors wormhole access to the Gamma Quadrant. It’s a trade and diplomatic outpost with a permanent population of perhaps three hundred, augmented periodically by individual visitors and transients. Its population embraces multiple races—humans, Ferengi, Klingons, Bajorans—but the feel is small town. There is only one bar, after all, where everyone runs into everyone else.
Babylon 5 is another space station, floating in isolation at the intersection of translightspeed travel corridors. It is also a city—a place that is big, dense, and full of different sorts of people. Like Deep Space Nine, it has identifiable boundaries—it’s a big metal container in the middle of nothingness—but Bab 5 is larger by three orders of magnitude. Its six levels teem with 100,000 humans and 150,000 members of other species. Interior spaces are specialized into residential neighborhoods and economic districts. A big bustling business district—the Zocalo—occupies part of Red Sector. Facilities range from baseball diamond to casino to courtrooms to factories and machine shops. There are officials, well-accounted citizens, a militant labor union, refugees, and an urban underclass in the partly finished Downbelow, where thieves and gangsters run a thriving black market and illicit businesses. On Deep Space Nine, Constable Odo can pretty well keep tabs on every resident. On Babylon 5, security chief Michael Garibaldi is constantly surprised by new faces, new problems, new gangs, new conspiracies.
Silhouetted in the vastness of space, the space habitat city Babylon 5 sits astride interstellar trade routes that bring it residents and representatives from multiple species and worlds. Tensions between its human majority and its diverse communities model the conflicts of a cosmopolitan crossroads city like fifteenth-century Venice or twenty-first-century London. Courtesy Warner Bros. Television/Photofest © Warner Bros. Television.
These imagined megastructures are the settings for two of the most popular—and simultaneously broadcast—science fiction television series of the late twentieth century. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which aired 174 episodes from 1993 to 1999, was a spinoff from Star Trek: The Next Generation with some secondary crossover characters. Babylon 5 aired 115 episodes from 1994 to 1998. Both shows regularly make lists of the best examples of science fiction TV.
Analogies from the history of the American West help to point out why one of the space stations is a city and the other is not. A good match for Deep Space Nine is Fort Vancouver, the Hudson’s Bay Company headquarters on the Columbia River from 1825 to 1846. It was a trading node with multiple peoples—Scots, French Canadians, Métis, Iroquois, Crees, Hawaiians—but only a few hundred in total. Boss John McLoughlin could take in the single stockaded fort with a glance.
If Fort Vancouver was a tenuous extension of empire, San Francisco during the gold rush and after was another Babylon 5—big, brawling, barely able to hold on to middle-class respectability. It had its Zocalo along Market Street and Union Square, its Downbelow vice district in the Barbary Coast. San Francisco’s population skyrocketed from a handful in 1847 to 57,000 by 1870 and 149,000 by 1880. It was a city of immigrants from Australia, South America, China, Europe, and the eastern United States—not so exotic a mix as at Babylon 5, but as disparate as you were likely to get in the nineteenth century.
Babylon 5 is a vast machine by definition. It is an enormously complex assemblage whose parts all have to work together, from power sources to airlocks, from ventilation systems to docking bays. But then, every city is a physical machine designed to sustain its residents. Into my house in Portland come water, natural gas, electricity, cable TV signals, Internet data to let me check on San Francisco’s early population, bags of groceries, books, and a bunch of other stuff. Out goes water down drains and toilets; heat through my dryer vent and open windows (in summer) and poorly sealed cracks (in winter); solid unneeded objects to recycling containers and trash can; books back to my local library branch; and phone messages back to the world through nearby (and unpopular) cell towers. Multiply my house eight hundred thousand times for my midsize metro area, add millions of square feet of retail and office space, schools, fire stations, and museums, and then add some more—the roads, bridges, rail lines, conduits, pipes, wires, cables, drains, sewers, elevators, and broadcasting towers that hold it all together. Any city is a huge interlinked object, a three-dimensional artifact that reaches above and below the level ground. It is both a vast abstract sculpture and a machine for living.
Cities full of aircars and slidewalks are close cousins of mundane cities with current pieces of technology extrapolated to support story lines. Superhigh cities of soaring towers extrapolate technologies like elevators and steel frame construction that have been available for 130 years. With space station cities, and domed habitats on airless worlds, and cities that float in air or water, and cities that pave over entire planets, something different is involved. Now the entire city with its overwhelming physical mass and form is the new technology that changes the ways that people can live. In short, the reimagined city itself is the new techno feat.
This chapter explores a particular type of city-machine whose fundamental imperative is to maintain and