Imagining Urban Futures. Carl Abbott
into crowded, squeaky trains with old chewing gum under the seats, but soon we’ll enjoy shiny silent subways that shoot passengers to their destinations with a pneumatic whoosh. We’ll no longer need to time dangerous dashes across intersections crowded with heedless automobiles when soaring sky bridges connect nearly topless towers. Forget freeway traffic jams—airspeeders will lift us off the pavement as they careen along skylanes that interweave among the towers.
These images are familiar from paintings, movies, and other visualizations of future cities. Artists know that one of the best ways to give a touch of “authenticity” to a science fiction cityscape is to fill the skies with personal flying machines. Aircars figure in the early tongue-in-cheek SF film Just Imagine (1930), in Blade Runner (1982), where the cops tool around in VTOL Spinners, and The Fifth Element (1997), where Bruce Willis is an aircabbie. If viewers thought the car chase through the streets of San Francisco was exciting in Bullitt (1968), how about an airspeeder chase through the airways of Coruscant in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)?
Cities are vast and complex machines for moving things around, and science fiction often suggests that movement will be slicker in the future. The idea that air avenues and air boulevards might seriously supplement or supplant surface streets goes back a century plus, to balloon ascensions, blimps, and the first powered flight. A flying car maneuvering through skyscraper canyons is an instantly recognizable sign that we are in the world of the future, and one that is especially vivid for readers and moviegoers in mundane cities whose skies are clear except for distant jetliners, occasional TV station news copters, and new law enforcement drones. Nearly a century ago, Hugo Gernsback included an aeroflyer in Ralph 124c 41+, introducing a relatively straight ancestor of George Jetson’s bubble-top aerocar. Predictions of personal flying vehicles were a post–World War II staple for Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Mechanix Illustrated, and other hobby magazines that combined real science, exciting speculation, and home projects.1 By the end of the twentieth century, the nostalgic lament that “It’s 199- [or even 20--] and where’s my aircar?” was a meme that infected syndicated columnist Gail Collins, the Tonight Show, and the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.
Some parts of the science fiction future have already happened. We have personal communication devices and voice recognition software, much like what fourteen-year-old Arcadia Darell used to do her home work in Isaac Asimov’s Second Foundation (1953). Smart phones do more tricks than Star Trek flip phone communicators. Imaging devices peer deep into the human body and send data to experts half a globe away, and we are working toward Dr. Leonard McCoy’s medical tricoder. Entire libraries pop up on our screens in a few keystrokes. Twenty-first-century cities have elevated people movers and monorails (not very successful), intercity maglev trains, and even occasional subdivisions built around airstrips—if not a Cessna in every garage.
The television series Futurama used science fiction clichés to satirize American society and popular culture. Among its most common features were aircars and air scooters, here ridden by Turanga Leela and Philip J. Fry. An aircar featured prominently in the show’s opening credits, swerving through the skies of New New York and crashing into a giant video screen displaying the name of creator Matt Groening. Courtesy Fox Broadcasting/Photofest © & TM Fox Broadcasting.
It is striking how easily aeroflyers fit into visions of urban futures. We don’t need to imagine cities radically transformed, but rather places that function much as they do now, but with a bit more zip and pizzazz. Aircars will be taxis and commuter vehicles and family sedans. They’ll chase criminals through the streets and engage in drag races. Because aircars are machines that instantly signal “future,” they are also tempting targets for satire. Episodes of Futurama (1999–2013), the American cartoon series from Simpsons creator Matt Groening, opens with an aircar careening wildly through the high-rise canyons of New New York before crashing into an animated billboard showing snippets of twentieth-century cartoons. The world of New New York in the year 3000 includes hover cars, pneumatic tubes rather than wheeled vehicles, wiseass robots, and spaceships that take off directly from the roof of the Planet Express headquarters, all in the interest of lampooning American culture, Star Trek, and the whole idea of better living through mechanical devices.2
MODERN AND MODERNE
Aircars are a prime feature of Techno City, my term for the future metropolis stocked with straight-line Popular Mechanics projections that imagine technological innovations and experiments as the everyday future … and as everyday, nonrevolutionary parts of such futures.3 Techno cities are places that work, where society and government have adopted and adapted to new technologies. Indeed, they often seem to work much the same way as the places where we already live. They have public and private transit and utility networks. They have hotels, shopping malls, government buildings, and neighborhoods. They have climate-controlled buildings with secure entry systems—now that retinal and fingerprint recognition locks are available in real time, perhaps it will be DNA recognition that opens the dilating door.
Techno City is often simply background for a story whose plot interest is elsewhere, an example of the framing technique that Robert Heinlein famously developed in the late 1930s and 1940s by inserting references to new technologies and customs into descriptive passages without offering elaborate explanations. These are obviously science fiction cities, reached by space travel or projected into the future—but their look and feel can be quite homey. They are like regular cities with enough new gizmos and spicing of technological change to signal that we are in a different time-place. Of course you get from one hotel floor to another with a bounce tube—how else would you do it? Of course newspaper pages turn themselves—hardly worth more than a passing nod of attention (especially since the pages of my daily paper now turn themselves on my iPad).
Here is an example from Heinlein’s story “The Roads Must Roll,” first published in Astounding in 1940 and widely anthologized as a Golden Age classic. The action takes place along the Diego-Reno roadtown, a vast moving highway that links the Los Angeles-Fresno-Stockton-Sacramento corridor. The “road” is a set of parallel moving slideways that step up from five miles per hour at the edge to a hundred miles per hour at the center. Using power from Solar Reception Screens, the United States has developed conveyor roads to save the nation from the unsustainable costs associated with maintaining 70 million automobiles (for perspective, the nonfictional United States actually had more than 250 million registered vehicles in the early twenty-first century). Solar-powered factories flank the roads and are flanked in turn by commercial districts, and then housing that is scattered over the surrounding rural landscape.
After this quick sketch, Heinlein drops his interest in the “city” part of roadcities. The plot involves a wildcat action by road maintenance technicians for the Stockton segment. Adherents of a radical worker ideology, they shut down the road, causing havoc among thousands of commuters. The federal officials who control the roads under the auspices of the military retake the Stockton office and quash the strike. The narrative choices met the expectations of Astounding readers, with attention to the physics of slideways, celebration of the disinterested engineer, and a slam at organized labor—a hot-button issue only five years after the organization of the CIO in 1935 and three years after the success of its controversial and technically illegal sit-in strike against General Motors.
Had he wished, Heinlein could have developed roadcities more fully. As early as 1882, Spanish designer Arturo Soria y Mata had proposed using railroads as the spine of what he called Cuidad Lineal, an idea that he illustrated with a scheme for a fifty-kilometer ring city around Madrid and a proposal for a linear city from Cádiz to St. Petersburg. The highly eccentric Edgar Chambliss advocated for a Roadtown from the 1910s to the 1930s, conceiving it as a row of Empire State Buildings laid end to end on top of an “endless basement” for service conduits. He got a friendly hearing from New Deal officials but no serious take-up.4 Meanwhile, Soviet planner Nikolai Miliutin in the 1930s suggested decentralizing industry in exurban corridors sandwiched between roads and rail lines and flanked by housing; the result was to be industrial efficiency, easy commutes for workers, and elimination of invidious