Imagining Urban Futures. Carl Abbott
that most resemble actual twenty-first-century cities with downtowns and suburbs. That is nearly a three-to-one margin for the vertical in the minds of artists of the fantastic—who also prefer the view from above or afar to depictions with a viewpoint in the midst of the urban action.
Future city drawing and paintings of the twenty-first century are strikingly similar to “King’s Dream of New York,” an image included in King’s Views of New York (1908–9). Moses King was a prolific compiler of guidebooks and pictorial portraits of Boston and New York, combining text with hundreds of photographs. New York, the American Cosmopolis: The Foremost City of the World was a typically immodest title from his busy publishing enterprise. In his rendition, Broadway is a concrete canyon, the real Singer Building is dwarfed by higher towers connected by sky bridges, and blimps and dirigibles swarm the sky.12
INSIDE THE TOWERS
The artists highlight the point that is implicit in proposals for unbuilt super-duper skyscrapers: height itself is the techno feat. Whether created by Frank Lloyd Wright or a computer artist, what makes the building or city a speculative fiction is the assumption of building technologies that can scale up the typical individual Chicago skyscraper to something bigger than currently possible. From the building that depends on particular machines for circulating people, air, and water among multiple floors (the real skyscraper of 1890–1920), the science fiction imagination moves to high-rise cities that depend on the sets of machines assembled in currently impractical ways.
British writer Ian Whates invites readers to visit “the city of a hundred rows” in City of Dreams and Nightmares (2010).13 The setting is Thaiburley, a high-rising city of a hundred levels or “rows.” To a traveler from the rural hinterlands, “the towering city walls were just as magnificent and awe-inspiring as imagination had painted them. The closer the city grew, the more its sheer scale became apparent” (176). The elite live at the top in the City Above, and hardscrabble folks dwell at the bottom in the cavernous City Below. Communication is by stairs, by escalators that span segments of a dozen or fifteen levels, and elevators that are paired so one goes up while the other down. These lifts span a limited number of levels, and you have to get off and cross to another platform to get to the next stage (think about riding multiple cog railways and cable cars to reach the summit of the Schilthorn or the Jungfrau in Switzerland). Much of the space of the Rows is interior rooms and dwellings, but each level has terraces that open to the air … you can fall off!
Whates tries to imagine Thaiburley as a fully articulated city. There are food supply levels, Shopping Rows, and a ground-level Market Row that has spread beyond the base of the city. “From Streets Below to the Market Row / From taverns and stalls to the Shopping Halls” goes a nursery rhyme. Further down, beneath the Market Row, are subsurface levels for the poor in “the vast cavern which housed Thaiburley’s lowest level” (56). Here are bazaars, aliens, street gangs, a river that provides power (and carries away waste), docks, factories, and “the Ruins” where there are taverns, whores, workers, bargemen, and beggars. Routes to the City Above are lucrative and claimed by groups and gangs who charge tolls. It is not clear how the basic large-scale supply of the City Above is organized, but there are scavengers called Swarbs (Sanitation Workers and Refuse Burners) who string nets to catch things and people that fall.
Even taller than Thaiburley is Spearpoint, the physical and conceptual pivot for Alastair Reynolds’s Terminal World (2010). It is a towering city in the shape of a cone, with a relatively wide base, a curved taper to higher levels, and then finally a spire that goes beyond habitable levels. Its footprint at the base is fifteen leagues across, narrowing to one-third of a league across at fifty leagues above the ground, whence it keeps rising into the vacuum (86). At this scale, it is big enough to house thirty million people (101).
To complicate the impressive techno feat of enormous height, Reynolds throws in weird physics. In horizontal bands are zones in which different levels of technology are physically possible: from bottom upward are Horsetown, Steamville, Neon Heights, Circuit City, a cyborg zone, and the Celestial Levels (whose “angel” inhabitants have evolved the ability to fly). People live in complexes of buildings on the surface of the tower and partway into the interior. Connections are by mechanical funiculars and by a railroad that runs on a curving ramp that circles and recircles the tower like the Tower of Babel in the images of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Gustave Doré. Horsetown encircles the base and spreads beyond it onto the surrounding planetary surface.
Despite their gargantuan height, Thaiburley and Spearpoint share a family resemblance with Burning Bright and Alphaville. Super-tall city buildings are cool, but height itself is not essential to the plot element of social hierarchy. Reynolds could just as well have imagined a horizontal city of concentric rings with different physical principles, with status declining from center to edge as in preindustrial cities. Whates has a lot more fun with the City Below than with the City Above, telling what is basically a story of cops, street gangs, and young people on the run through back alleys and abandoned buildings. Nor does the inevitable physical complexity of these tower-cities play an important role. Apart from describing the transportation systems, the authors do not take all that much effort to imagine how such cities might actually work as artificial ecologies. There are workshops and shops and apartments inside Spearpoint and Thaiburley, but they are ordinary spaces, and the exciting action takes place on the outsides of the structures as bodies are pitched or fall to their death and characters flee and are chased by air, stairways, and funicular railways that cling to the surface.
Although Spearpoint is an extravagant science implausibility, it was easy for writers in the later twentieth century to draw on the commonly accepted critique of massive public housing projects as alienating environments that nurtured social problems—whether U.S. examples like the infamous Pruitt-Igoe buildings in St. Louis or the sterile working-class apartment blocks of Paris or Moscow—and project social breakdown. Thomas Disch set his grittily detailed novel 334 (1972) in a subsidized twenty-one-story building at 334 East Eleventh Street, New York. In the 2020s its three thousand residents are supervised by a paternalistic bureaucracy, cope with malfunctioning elevators and deteriorating services, scam social workers to survive, and take refuge in drugs, television, and meaningless violence. As science fiction scholar Rob Latham has pointed out, Disch’s near-future New York embodies much of the analysis of neo-Marxist geographers like David Harvey and Manuel Castells. Except for the elderly isolated in upper floors, residents are free to use the city around them, but only on the terms set by the structures of power and authority.14
Robert Silverberg and J. G. Ballard, in contrast, set novels entirely within high-rise buildings and use those settings to explore the impacts of concentrated and claustrophobic living on individuals trapped inside and unable to escape to freedom or adventure. Silverberg’s The World Inside (1971) is pure science fiction, positing a world in which seventy-five billion humans live in megabuilding “urban monads”—urbmons—that could be characterized as cheerful dystopias. Ballard sets High-Rise (1975) in a skewed present in which an expensive condominium tower in the London Docklands erodes all social bonds and turns its residents into murderous sociopaths. In both books, however, the tall building is both a technological accomplishment and something more, a presence that conditions and drives individual behavior as much as the Alaska wilderness changes Buck from domestic pet to feral creature in Call of the Wild.
Silverberg wrote the linked stories that constitute The World Inside in 1970 and 1971, at a time when both the public and science fiction were obsessed with the threat of overpopulation. In good SF fashion, Silverberg decided to reverse the expectations and explore the possibilities of a society in which population growth was applauded—requiring vast buildings to house the multitudes and, in turn, elaborate systems of social regulation to maintain order. The social reversal draws directly on the sexual revolution of the baby boomer generation: urbmon society encourages sex for procreation from the early teens, has no nudity taboo, and promotes open promiscuity, with every woman theoretically available to any man. The structures that house the busy billions similarly extrapolate then-current urban thought. They are grouped in clusters with names like Chipitts, Sansan, and Wienbud (in Europe)—terms coined following publication in 1961 of Jean Gottmann’s Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States, which