Imagining Urban Futures. Carl Abbott

panels. The engineers use peripheral skyscrapers as anchors, some of which have to be sheared off to fit the slope. It will not be a Martian-style bubble tent but rather a gigantic cousin of a geodesic dome, although with hexagonal instead of triangular panels.

      Pohl never explains why it is necessary or desirable for the Big Apple to become the Big Blister. He refers briefly to creating an enclosed, relatively self-sustaining system—garbage will be recycled rather than barged and dumped at sea, gas-powered cars will be replaced, there will be more recycling of materials—but in the next story the barges are still at work. The dome is periodically vented to get rid of radon, but readers otherwise do not know how air circulates. The dome does allow climate control within the range of 15–28 Celsius, perhaps the reason that a city like Tucson followed with its own smaller “thermal dome.” In the fourth and fifth sections, the existence of the dome is background (it allows for exciting but illegal hang gliding, for example).

      A few years after Pohl imagined the evolution of New York, C. J. Cherryh took on the same task in “Highliner,” one of six stories about the distant future of earthbound cities collected and published as Sunfall (1981). Her New York is a superhigh, ever-growing pyramid whose “single spire aimed at the clouds, concave-curved from sprawling base to needle heights” (106). The city is constantly expanding, building and rebuilding its burdened foundations, pushing higher, adding space to intermediate levels. Smaller suburban towers cluster around it, metropolis and mountain range at the same time.

      Both authors are careful to undercut the impressions of grandeur that their megastructures might evoke. Pohl’s city is socially messy, with a touch of political repression. His protagonist in “Blister” is an ordinary worker who helps to assemble the great dome. Cherryh’s city is an ultimately futile effort on a dying planet with a fading sun. Like Pohl, she centers her story on the city’s “highliners,” the skilled specialists who risk their lives to inspect and repair the exterior of the tower while dangling from flimsy ropes and harnesses. Her basic plot is routine—workers unite to resist corrupt corporations—but the name of the central character, John Tallfeather, recalls the Mohawk Indians who worked skyscraper construction in twentieth-century New York. With both stories, readers get indirect answers to the questions in Bertolt Brecht’s poem “A Worker Reads History,” which asks “Who built the seven gates of Thebes? … In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished, where did the masons go?”

      Cherryh’s future New York is a mighty and monstrous artifact, but it has nothing on Isaac Asimov’s definitive supersized city. Eager readers who bought the first volume of Asimov’s Foundation for its cover art when it appeared in book form in 1951 might have expected, from the lines of rocket ships swirling toward the center of a vast galaxy, to plunge immediately into a space battle or an expedition to alien worlds. Instead they found themselves on the very strange planet Trantor … and in the world-encompassing imperial city of Trantor.

      Asimov’s readers were visitors in the ultimate covered city. It’s big, with a population of forty-five billion, many of them administrators who manage the affairs of the twelve-thousand-year Galactic Reich. The city covers all seventy-five million square miles of the planet’s land surface and creeps out onto the continental shelves. Only occasional parks and the imperial palace offer touches of green to relieve Trantor’s metallic gray. Nearly everyone lives underground. Asimov introduces the city by tracing newcomer Gaal Dornick’s breakneck trip from spaceport to hotel in an air taxi that plunges into a high wall “riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels” and flies on through blackness “with nothing but the past-flashing of a colored signal light to relieve the gloom” (8). When he wakes the next day, he cannot tell day from night, for “all the planet seemed to live beneath metal” (9). Trantoropolis extends only a few hundred feet above the surface but reaches a mile belowground. From an infrequently used viewing tower Gaal “could see no horizon other than that of metal against sky, stretching out to almost uniform grayness … all the busy traffic of billions of men were going on, he knew, beneath the metal skin of the world” (11). In follow-on books, as the atmosphere deteriorates, Trantorians erect domes to cover their surface buildings in addition to carrying on their lives in the climate-controlled underground.³

      Trantor is a long way in time and space from New York, but Pohl and Asimov shared the same impulse to imagine a city as a stupendous engineering project. There is no apparent reason to dome over New York—the ambient atmosphere is quite breathable—but it is definitely an intriguingly futuristic idea that assumes the ability to consume impressive volumes of resources. To imagine Trantor is to take this sort of fascination with the sheer physicality of future cities to its extreme, and also to put their operating systems front and center in the same way as in air-bubble cities, although again there is really no practical reason offered for the gee-whiz gigantism. A world-encompassing city makes extreme demands on the urban metabolism—the importation of the food, fuel, and materials that keep it functioning and the elimination of waste products ranging from excess heat to garbage. Trantor gets its power from the temperature difference between the surface and the deep planetary interior. It depends on the agricultural production of twenty-four planets in the same way that Rome depended on grain from North Africa, wine from Greece, and olive oil from Spain—one of the many parallels to the history of Rome on which Asimov built his galactic history.

      Trantor is an ultimate entry in the reimagination of cities along the horizontal plane that began in the later nineteenth century, when the spread of railroads and streetcars broke the physical limits of cities based on walking. Not long after Arturo Soria y Mata imagined a single linear city stretching between opposite corners of Europe, Patrick Geddes, in 1915, coined “conurbation” to describe the growing together of previously distinct cities in industrial regions like the Ruhr and the English Midlands. The U.S. Census tried to give bureaucratic precision to the idea by defining “metropolitan districts” in 1920 and “metropolitan areas” in 1940 to encompass cities and increasingly sprawling suburbs in a single unit. Jean Gottmann simply took the effort another step in arguing that the entire northeastern United States from Boston to Washington functioned as a single “megalopolis”—a concept quickly adapted in Japan as megaroporisu for the Taiheiyo Belt along the southeast-facing coast of Honshu. It got new life in the twenty-first century as “megaregion” in the United States and “mega-urban region” in China.⁴

      Megalopolis is an easy transfer to science fiction, offering writers a quick way give a sense of verisimilitude to their near-future settings. Much of the action in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) takes place in “BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis” (57). The Judge Dredd comics, published since 1977, take place in the twenty-second century in Mega-City One, which extends roughly from Florida to Ontario (or is it Georgia to Montreal—consistency not being a strong point over decades of comic books) with somewhere between one hundred million and eight hundred million residents (ditto). However, fiction has struggled to out-extrapolate mundane planning discourse, especially the work of the enthusiastic Greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis, who envisioned Ecumenopolis—a single supercity that might extend its ten drils across entire continents. Assuming a planetary population of forty or fifty billion, he projected from metropolis to megalopolis to world city in an essay on “Ecumenopolis: Tomorrow’s City”: