Taking off from design urbanism, the first three chapters explore different ways in which we envision future cities as physical objects—impressive, imposing, exciting, curious. “Techno City” deals with cities as containers for new technologies, from slideways to high-rise towers. The cities in “Machines for Breathing” become mega-machines in themselves, huge comprehensive artifacts that depend on sophisticated engineering to function. “Migratory Cities” are a variation on the self-contained cities of the previous chapters, carrying designer thought experiments to imaginative extremes in fictional form. Because these cities appear in narratives rather than in architectural portfolios and engineering specs, people in crisis and conflict drive the story line; but the physical container itself—whether space station city, migratory city, or some other variation—stirs readers’ imaginations. C. J. Cherryh builds interesting characters and exciting situations to make Downbelow Station an exciting read, for example, but the central tension revolves around the fragility or survivability of the huge space-station city itself.
Chapters on “The Carceral City” and “Crabgrass Chaos” begin to shift focus to cities as social environments. The physical character of the city remains important—the city of refuge or city behind walls in the one chapter, the decaying suburban environment in the other. The pivots of the stories, however, are human responses to two types of confinement. Carceral cities are places where the physical barriers of ramparts and cavern walls produce psychological imprisonment that is integrated into the culture of everyday life—to be broken only by maverick misfits. The residents of feral suburbs, in contrast, live in places only a step from newspaper headlines. They are individually rebellious but imprisoned by the economic and social limitations of poverty, and their stories are dramas of stress and survival.
Chapter 6 deals with the variety of catastrophes that can threaten to undermine and destroy metropolitan life, and with the abandoned cities that result from disaster. Like the suburbs of “Crabgrass Chaos,” the tottering cities discussed in “Soylent Green Is People!” are earthbound places of the near future. Over the decades, science fiction has explored a variety of crisis-and-collapse scenarios drawn from the social sciences and from societal fears of proletarian revolution, overpopulation, and overconsumption.22 Cities intensify and concentrate problems and pressures to the point of social breakdown, planting the seeds of their own destruction. The result may be the abandoned cities that populate chapter 7 with stories of post-apocalyptic Earth and distant worlds where danger lurks among the ruins.
“Market and Mosaic” focuses on the city as a nexus of human activity—the city as social and economic community. Cities bring disparate individuals in contact with each other, sometimes through exchanges in the marketplace, sometimes through the interactions of communities and neighborhoods. By this point in the book, the city as megamachine no longer dominates the imaginative horizon. We come instead to a ground-level view of life on the streets and in the neighborhoods. This is where the science fiction city becomes most relevant to contemporary problems. Cordwainer Smith could model the social inequities of mid-twentieth-century America through the metaphor of fantastic cities, William Gibson can highlight the city as creative environment, and China Miéville can offer cities that reflect the real places in which we live and work.
Imagining Urban Futures thus moves in a broad arc from the physical city to the social city. Extrapolating current technologies, inventing new city types, and extending visionary ideas about urban form to their logical extremes can be fun, but the imagined cities remain thought experiments. They are limited by the practical constraints of materials science, energy consumption, and safety engineering. As Harry Harrison observed in Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965), world-spanning cities with populations in the tens of billions will have a major garbage disposal problem. Places can be interesting in themselves, but the most compelling stories are about the experience of living in specific places with distinct social relations, histories, and myths. My approach is congruent with the work of Michel de Certeau, who contrasts the totalizing view of a city from a skyscraper observation deck to the ways in which urbanites actually construct and experience city life as they inhabit the streets and buildings of the metropolis.23 To twist a phrase that Mrs. Snedeker used to explain “synecdoche” to my seventh-grade class, the container of the physical city is much less interesting than the individuals who are the “thing contained.”24
Writers like Samuel R. Delany, Molly Gloss, and Octavia Butler have used the possibilities and limitations of future cities to explore character under stress. Texts as different as Blade Runner and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl reproduce and interrogate the social inequities of modern society. This embedded argument about cities as creative social milieux leads to my choice of Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Science in the Capital” trilogy about political and scientific responses to global warming as the final example. It is science fiction that is earthbound, near future, politically engaged, and character driven, and which recognizes the large metropolis of Washington as a set of constantly shifting small communities. Even under stress, residents cooperate and public systems work—an implicit refutation of the libertarian survivalist scenarios common in much American science fiction.25
This exploration of science fiction and cities ends purposefully on the upbeat. I like cities large and small—a good thing, since I have been studying and writing about their history for over forty years. There are plenty of dystopian cities among my examples, but the book is structured around the variety of imagined city types rather than a contrast of rational utopias, critical utopias, and utterly bleak dystopias.26 What makes cities attractive and exciting is that very variety. Urbanization and urban life present plenty of challenges, but cities are where ideas happen as their residents interact in a dazzling number of combinations. John Stuart Mill long ago recognized the importance of cities as centers of interaction: “It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar…. Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.”27 The thought experiments of science fiction cities, in all their disparate versions and types, embody and contribute to that dialogue. Avid viewers and readers of science fiction may well find that I have missed a telling example and left out their favorite city. By all means let me know so we can continue a conversation beyond the confines of this book.
CHAPTER ONE
TECHNO CITY; OR, DUDE, WHERE’S MY AIRCAR?
Joh Fredersen’s eyes wandered over Metropolis, a restless roaring sea with a surf of light. In the flashes and waves, the Niagara falls of light, in the colour-play of revolving towers of light and brilliance, Metropolis seemed to have become transparent. The houses, dissected into cones and cubes by the moving scythes of the search-lights gleamed, towering up, hoveringly, light flowing down their flanks like rain.—Thea von Harbou, Metropolis (1927)
They glided down an electric staircase, and debouched on the walkway which bordered the north-bound five-mile-an-hour strip. After skirting a stairway trunk marked “Overpass to Southbound Road,” they paused at the edge of the first strip. “Have you ever ridden a conveyor strip before?” Gaines inquired. “It’s quite simple. Just remember to face against the motion of the strip as you get on.” They threaded their way through homeward-bound throngs, passing from strip to strip.—Robert Heinlein, “The Roads Must Roll” (1940)
Commuting is going to be lots more fun in the future.
Where now we trudge wearily