Imagining Urban Futures. Carl Abbott
be front and center as vividly imagined worlds whose characteristics play active roles that help to structure the arc of the story, forcing and constraining the choices that the characters make. For earthly cities, the Los Angeles of Octavia Butler in Parable of the Sower (1993) and the Bangkok of Paolo Bacigalupi in The Windup Girl (2009) fill the bill. Their state of physical and social decay is an essential driver for their developing plots. On an imagined world, New Crobuzon is as much a force in China Miéville’s novels as London was for Charles Dickens. Cities are sentient actors in John Shirley’s City Come A-Walkin (1980), Greg Bear’s Strength of Stones (1988), and Carrie Richerson’s “The City in Morning” (1999).
There are thousands of science fiction cities—as many or more than the number of actual cities of twenty-first-century Earth. My solution to this abundance is to identify common ways in which we imagine the urban future in a wide and eclectic range of books, films, and television rather than dwelling on a few noteworthy examples, although familiar places like Arthur C. Clarke’s Diaspar and Isaac Asimov’s Trantor will make their appearance. No matter how varied the specific twists and locations, science fiction writers imagine future and alternative cities in several distinct ways—as machines, for example, or as prisons, or, sometimes, as places just a little bit different from those of today. The field supplies a shared repertoire of city types that writers can use for background or develop for their own purposes.
As we think about the multiple cities of science fiction, it is useful to consider additional syllogisms that suggest two basic and inclusive ways that the field approaches cities. One strand derives from the technological/design imagination and its ability to think up cities whose form and function express new technical possibilities. The second comes from the desire to consider future social and cultural systems that find their most developed and conflicted forms in cities. Together the physical and social imaginations create the two big clusters of city types explored in the following chapters.
Science fiction is about the implications of new technologies.
Cities are the most complex of technological artifacts.
Therefore, science fiction is [often] about the physical and
technological possibilities of city making.
Science fiction tries to explore the future of human society.
Cities are the central organizing system for human society.
Therefore, SF is [often] about the complexities of living in future cities.
The first syllogism reaches back to early efforts to imagine the shape of ideal places, both fantastical schemes like Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602) and bureaucratic prescriptions like the Laws of the Indies that the Spanish crown promulgated as a guide to laying out colonial cities in the Americas. The impulse continued in the proposals of early industrial-era reformers like Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, who were engrossed with schemes for social betterment through remaking the physical structure of settlements. These were the “utopian socialists” whom Friedrich Engels pointedly criticized for ignoring the primacy of economic relationships that truly determined spatial patterns. In practice, early Western utopias imitated the everyday communities of the time. The City of the Sun was an idealized Renaissance city. Fourier’s phalanstery and the idealized scheme for Owen’s Harmony colony in Indiana resembled the factory/dormitory complexes of textile towns like Lowell, Massachusetts.4
About 150 years ago, new technologies of transportation—horizontal railways and self-powered automobiles, vertical elevators—allowed the design imagination to expand and soar. Facing ever-growing industrial cities, design visionaries began to explore a fundamental choice: Should the metropolis deconcentrate or centralize more effectively—should it grow outward or upward? In the first group we can count Frederick Law Olmsted, Horace Cleveland, and other landscape architects who wanted to reduce urban densities by building parks and open space into the urban fabric. Ebenezer Howard proposed “Garden Cities of To-morrow” (his 1902 book title) as a way to deconcentrate London. Frank Lloyd Wright’s scheme for Broadacre City preceded the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the New York World’s Fair, with its model of a freeway nation in miniature, by only seven years. The opposite impulse was to envision megastructures that extrapolated the first-generation skyscrapers of New York and Chicago. The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier proposed clusters of towers in a park linked into a single entity by underground passages. Paolo Soleri envisioned vast self-contained cities for hundreds of thousands of residents with quirky names like “3-D Jersey” and “Novanoah.”5
Pictures are powerful, and the visual punch of creative design has made it a rich source for science fiction. As Bruce Sterling has noted, genre science fiction emerged in tandem with the art deco extravaganzas of “century of progress” expositions in Chicago (1933–34), New York (1939–40), and San Francisco (1939–40), which provided the visual vocabulary that artists like Frank R. Paul transmuted into pulp magazine covers.6 Garden cities, Corbusian towers, and arcologies have all come with compelling diagrams and drawings that easily capture eyes and imaginations—especially Soleri’s drawings in the oversized Arcology: The City in the Image of Man.7 Architects continue to relish chances to show their imaginations and drawing skills, as with eVolo magazine’s decade-long imaginary skyscraper competition.8 The fantastic cities of comics, anime, and video games extend the same tradition of science fiction as a visual medium.
Behind many of the classic diagrams and drawings, however, are social visions that link to the second syllogism. Ebenezer Howard wanted to find a route toward a socialist society via land reform inspired by the theories of Henry George in Progress and Poverty (1879), with Garden Cities as the tool rather than the end point. The first edition of his book in 1899 summarized his goal with its title To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, and he regretted the distracting diagrams he had published as thought experiments. With an approach completely opposite that of his contemporary Howard, the eccentric entrepreneur King Camp Gillette in 1894 proposed consolidating the entire American population in a single vast metropolis in western New York State to counter the chaos of individualism.9 Le Corbusier and Soleri both claimed the environmental goal of freeing land from urban encroachment by concentrating people within limited building footprints. Recurring proposals for lineal cities stretched along transportation lines have aimed at economic efficiency and social equality—a sort of urbanist manifestation of collectivist principles.
Even design utopians thus recognize that the social dimension is primary in the process of urban growth, despite the seductions of the visual. Cities are vast physical objects because they are machines for making connections among thousands and millions of individuals. They are human life support systems with distinct metabolisms. They collect, process, and distribute goods and information in the complex economy of production and consumption. They bring individuals together to facilitate the routines of everyday life. In The Gold Coast (1988), Kim Stanley Robinson interweaves all three connective functions. He highlights the freeway system as the support structure for future Orange County, California, critiques defense contractors as the economic drive wheel, and explores individual efforts to connect into communities through workplace, school, church, and social clique. The picture is not pretty, for the book is Robinson’s version of California well along the wrong path of rampant capitalism, but the elements of connection are there.
Like Robinson, ecologists, economists, geographers, and sociologists all want to understand the costs and benefits of urban connectivity: Do cities run on poverty and immiseration as their necessary social and economic fuel, an assertion that goes back to Karl Marx? Do capitalist cities generate spatially structured inequality by their very nature, as geographer David Harvey argues, or do they provide the tools with which individuals build the capacities to improve their lives? How do the new contacts and interactions that they enable compare with the social worlds in alternative settings such as small towns and villages? Is community-without-propinquity—the development of interpersonal connections based on common interests rather than residential proximity—as rich as localized neighborhood communities?10
Anglo-American culture—the dominant seedbed of science fiction—assumes the negative about urban life more often and more