What science fiction can teach us about urban planning
Carl Abbott, who has taught urban studies and urban planning in five decades, brings together urban studies and literary studies to examine how fictional cities in work by authors as different as E. M. Forster, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and China Miéville might help us to envision an urban future that is viable and resilient. Imagining Urban Futures is a remarkable treatise on what is best and strongest in urban theory and practice today, as refracted and intensely imagined in science fiction. As the human population grows, we can envision an increasingly urban society. Shifting weather patterns, rising sea levels, reduced access to resources, and a host of other issues will radically impact urban environments, while technology holds out the dream of cities beyond Earth. Abbott delivers a compelling critical discussion of science fiction cities found in literary works, television programs, and films of many eras from Metropolis to Blade Runner and Soylent Green to The Hunger Games, among many others.
What science fiction can teach us about urban planning
Carl Abbott, who has taught urban studies and urban planning in five decades, brings together urban studies and literary studies to examine how fictional cities in work by authors as different as E. M. Forster, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and China Miéville might help us to envision an urban future that is viable and resilient. Imagining Urban Futures is a remarkable treatise on what is best and strongest in urban theory and practice today, as refracted and intensely imagined in science fiction. As the human population grows, we can envision an increasingly urban society. Shifting weather patterns, rising sea levels, reduced access to resources, and a host of other issues will radically impact urban environments, while technology holds out the dream of cities beyond Earth. Abbott delivers a compelling critical discussion of science fiction cities found in literary works, television programs, and films of many eras from Metropolis to Blade Runner and Soylent Green to The Hunger Games, among many others.
Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in Science Fiction and What We Might Learn from Them
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Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in Science Fiction and What We Might Learn from Them
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Overview
What science fiction can teach us about urban planning
Carl Abbott, who has taught urban studies and urban planning in five decades, brings together urban studies and literary studies to examine how fictional cities in work by authors as different as E. M. Forster, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and China Miéville might help us to envision an urban future that is viable and resilient. Imagining Urban Futures is a remarkable treatise on what is best and strongest in urban theory and practice today, as refracted and intensely imagined in science fiction. As the human population grows, we can envision an increasingly urban society. Shifting weather patterns, rising sea levels, reduced access to resources, and a host of other issues will radically impact urban environments, while technology holds out the dream of cities beyond Earth. Abbott delivers a compelling critical discussion of science fiction cities found in literary works, television programs, and films of many eras from Metropolis to Blade Runner and Soylent Green to The Hunger Games, among many others.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819576729 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/13/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 276 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
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 on crowded sidewalks, we'll ride cheerfully along on slideways. Now we squeeze 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 bubbletop 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. 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.
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.
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. 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. 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 class distinctions between center and periphery — a sort of urban industrial version of King Arthur's round table. A decade later, Le Corbusier sketched a similar sort of linear industrial city (without acknowledging any predecessors).
The idea resurfaced in the United States after World War II as automobiles began to draw tightly centered downtowns outward along highway corridors. Journalist Christopher Rand in 1965 suggested that Los Angeles had a spine rather than a heart, commenting that the Wilshire-Sunset axis rather than downtown functioned as the urban core. He was channeling architect Richard Neutra, who soon after arriving in Los Angeles from Europe sketched "Rush City Reframed," consisting of traffic corridors lined with slab high-rises — quite like the unfortunate Robert Taylor Homes that would march alongside Chicago's Dan Ryan Expressway from 1962 to 2007. The thought experiments have kept on coming, such as the Jersey Corridor Project of Princeton University architecture professors Michael Graves and Peter Eisenman, proposed in 1965 at the start of their high-profile careers. Living in what was beginning to emerge as the Princeton area Edge City, they suggested bowing to the inevitable by connecting Trenton to New Brunswick with two parallel megastructures sandwiching and surrounded by strips of green, since "a linear city is the city of the twentieth century." The urban ordinary is a pervasive foundation through Heinlein's work in the 1940s and 1950s. The protagonists in "The Roads Must Roll" stop for a meal at Jake's Steakhouse No. 4, which comes complete with crusty proprietress and two-inch slabs of beef. In The Door into Summer, written in 1956, he projected protagonist Daniel Boone Davis thirty years into his future from 1970 to 2000. Because Heinlein's interest was time travel paradoxes, he depicted a Los Angeles that still worked pretty much the same as the twentieth-century city, but with some new laws and customs. In Double Star (1956), guests in the Hotel Eisenhower do indeed use bounce tubes rather than elevators, but the hotel rooms are numbered by floors, just like twentieth-century hotel rooms.
The urban ordinary is also a powerful presence in films set on near-future Earth and Earthlike places, where the "shinier" parts of the contemporary cityscape stand in for cities to come. Jean-Luc Godard used the high-rise towers of the brand-new La Défense district of Paris to represent an extraterrestrial city in Alphaville (1965). Office buildings and shopping malls in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, are the 2054 future in Minority Report (2002). Contemporary Los Angeles plays the role of future cities in In Time (2011), and LA and Irvine office buildings stand in for the mid-twenty-first century in Demolition Man (1993). In Total Recall (1990), portions of Mexico City do duty as a city of 2084.
These cinematic choices show the lasting cultural resonance of the art moderne and streamlined styles of the mid-twentieth century. Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition in 1933 and the New York World's Fair of 1939 used similar architectural rhetoric to signify progress during the troubled times of the Great Depression. In the midst of postwar prosperity, the organizers of the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle in 1962 made the same choices — the Space Needle is a kissing cousin of New York's Trylon and Perisphere. The aesthetic road took one fork to the glistening aluminum-and-glass skyscrapers of the 1950s and 1960s, another to the exuberant atomic age / space age "googie" architecture of motels, bowling alleys, and drive-in restaurants. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Oral Roberts University campus from the 1960s echoes the cardboard Buzz Corey spaceport that I assembled on my bedroom floor in 1952.
The ability of the sleek side of twentieth-century design to represent the future has an uncomfortable implication. Embedded is an unspoken assumption that cities aren't changing all that much or that fast. The last two generations, suggest several observers, have seen few innovations that have fundamentally changed the character of urban areas. Tyler Cowan has called it "the great stagnation," Peter Thiel has complained about "the end of the future," and Neal Stephenson about "innovation starvation." Urban areas changed drastically from 1840 to 1940, but perhaps not so much since then. Most adults in the 2010s could be transported back to the 1940s and still get along — at least if their dads had made sure they learned how to drive a stick shift. Elevators no longer need operators for the mind-numbing work of opening doors and calling the floors, but they are still elevators. Traffic lights still cycle back and forth between red and green. I write on a two-year-old laptop, but I charge it with electricity from Columbia River dams and transmission lines that predate World War II. Even implementation of "big data" to create "smart cities" is being applied to old functions like better traffic-light cycles and more efficient siting of firehouses.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment of expectations has involved the impacts of electronic communication. The advent of personal computing and Internet connections in the 1980s spurred great expectations for urban decentralization. Soon, proclaimed the enthusiasts, crowded cities would be obsolete. Production workers would operate machinery by remote control, and professional workers would relocate to their favorite seacoast, mountain valley, or small town. Well, a bit of that has happened: radiologists can read X-ray results at a distance, college students can win big bucks with online poker, and soldiers can operate drones from consoles an ocean and continent away from their West Asian targets. Nevertheless, cities have continued to grow in both developed and developing nations. Superabundant flows of information turn out to favor greater centralization of decision making because on-site managers are less essential. The result has been the solidification of a global urban hierarchy topped by what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls global cities — New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, and their ilk. Meanwhile, the centers of many old industrial cities like Birmingham (UK) or Chicago look just as good as or better than they did fifty years ago with the benefit of changing generational tastes and massive reinvestment.
SKYSCRAPER CITY
If real cities haven't lived up to techno-hype, the science fiction fixation on the sleekest of cityscapes to signal the future raises an interesting question about the technological city. The visual choices of film designers suggest, by and large, that the future will be not only shiny but also tall, a place where glass-and-steel towers frame urban airways through which the aircars weave. This is an imaginative leap, for cities over many millennia were far wider than they were high. Limited to five or six stories by construction technologies and the willingness of people to trudge up stairs, they draped over the landscape like slightly lumpy pancakes. Over the last 150 years, cities have been rethought and sometimes rebuilt in ways that prioritize height over breadth. Indeed, the vertical city of the real twenty-first century — Hong Kong, New York, Shanghai, Dubai — is itself a radical reimagining of traditional cities. In turn, science fiction has taken skyscraper districts as the most common jump-off for even bigger, higher, and denser cities of the future. For one example take Bruce Sterling's description of future Singapore in Islands in the Net (1988): "Nightmarishly vast spires whose bulging foundations covered whole city blocks. ... Storey after storey rose silent and dreamlike, buildings so unspeakably huge that they lost all sense of weight; they hung above the earth like Euclidean thunderheads, their summits lost in sheets of steel-gray rain" (215).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Imagining Urban Futures"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Carl Abbott.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Techno City; or, Dude, Where's My Aircar?
Machines for Breathing
Migratory Cities
Utopia with Walls: The Carceral City
Crabgrass Chaos
Soylent Green Is People! Varieties of Urban Crisis
Keep Out, You Idiots! The Deserted City
Market and Mosaic
Afterword: Cities That Will Work
Notes
Notes on Sources
Index
What People are Saying About This
"By day Carl Abbott is one of the most respected urban historians of his generation; by night he is among the most omnivorous and omniscient sci-fi fanboys of all time. This book brings together both sides of his brain for a unique guided tour of science fiction cities in their many manifestations, familiar and obscure. As he shows, science fiction has found its own radical way to represent, to critique, and ultimately to re-design the city."—Robert Fishman, University of Michigan
"By day Carl Abbott is one of the most respected urban historians of his generation; by night he is among the most omnivorous and omniscient sci-fi fanboys of all time. This book brings together both sides of his brain for a unique guided tour of science fiction cities in their many manifestations, familiar and obscure. As he shows, science fiction has found its own radical way to represent, to critique, and ultimately to re-design the city."—Robert Fishman, University of Michigan
"Carl Abbott has long been valued as a thoughtful and creative urban historian. Here he has organized the 'thought experiments' we call science fiction into sensible categories that explain the imaginative responses to technological and social change in cities. The book is encyclopedic in its reach and will be consulted for years to come."—Sam Bass Warner, Jr., author of American Urban Form
“By day Carl Abbott is one of the most respected urban historians of his generation; by night he is among the most omnivorous and omniscient sci-fi fanboys of all time. This book brings together both sides of his brain for a unique guided tour of science fiction cities in their many manifestations, familiar and obscure.As he shows, science fiction has found its own radical way to represent, to critique, and ultimately to re-design the city.”
“Carl Abbott has long been valued as a thoughtful and creative urban historian. Here he has organized the ‘thought experiments’ we call science fiction into sensible categories that explain the imaginative responses to technological and social change in cities. The book is encyclopedic in its reach and will be consulted for years to come.”