I guess it is not, really. But it did show a life lived out in the gritty ‘underclass’ of society and the emotional problems this existance can have on the inhabitants of such a world. It could be seen as many peoples idea of a contemporary dystopia, already existing within most major cities.
Logan’s Run
A couple that may not be considered “urban,” but are certainly future dystopias:
Tank Girl
Handmaid’s Tale
A Boy and His Dog
Here’s the dirty little secret of city planning.
People hate cities.
Always have, always will. They move there for economic reasons (or because that’s the port of debarkation and they can’t go any further) but hate the noise, the crowding, the high prices, the crime, the lack of greenery, and most of all, the physical proximity of neighbors on all sides.
As soon as it is physically possible to move out and still retain contact with the city cheaply and quickly, they do so. The Roman elite already had their villas in the suburbs. Robert E. Lee commuted from his house in Arlington to Washington when he was stationed there before the Civil War.
The railroads really created suburbs - and sprawl - the way we know it today. London and New York and Philadelphia - that’s what the Main Line is, a commuter railroad with a line of wealthy suburbs - all had them by the end of the 19th century. (And when Philadelphia grew from William Penn’s two square miles to a behemoth around that time it absorbed Chestnut Hill, creating the suburb in a city enclave that can be seen all over the northeastern US from Buffalo to Baltimore. Best of both worlds, but only available to the upper middle classes.)
The city was still a viable entity when Le Corbusier was writing in the 1920s, but it died a hideous and lengthy death starting around 1950 in the US. (Everything I say about the US is true for Europe as well, although it took longer for it to happen. Downtown Glasgow looks exactly like the broken urban core of any old US industrial city.) The automobile, affluence, and the expressway combined to make it possible for people to move out of the city and into the suburbs. They did by the tens of millions.
And nobody noticed. That’s the joke. That’s why it was still possible for Doxiadis and Archigram and their equivalents in the US and the hideous despoilers of the urban renewal movement to flourish in the 1960s. It is history’s greatest and most pernicious example of the futurologists not noticing the future happening all around them. (Approached only by their counterparts writing computer and business books in the early 1990s, which you can search from end to end and not find a hint of a mention of something like the Internet.)
The classical urban core dead was already dead by the 1960s. But the urban planners went blithely on planning for ever larger and more efficient urban cores. Nobody paid attention to them then, and the people voted with their feet to get out.
Nobody is paying any attention to them or their masturbatory fantasies today either. Oh, you get your Harbourfronts in Baltimore (which you have to approach through a mile of totally dead and decaying downtown) and New Urbanism little villages and renovation of loft apartments to attract young singles, and they tout their success at getting 1,000 people back to living in downtown and decide not to notice that another 10,000 of the middle class have slipped out of the city while this was going on and that the young singles will follow them as soon as they have children of school age.
Suburbs are now 2 to 8 times as large as their central cores. Central cores are dead. At best you see efforts like Cleveland, which is switching over to a mode of attracting out of town tourists to downtown rather than locals. Philadelphia never recovered from losing Gimbels and is trying with huge heaves to make the transition. Smaller non-tourist-attractive cities have nothing to offer. The big four of New York State - Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany - are near financial collapse. The same is true in Connecticut. Detroit is already proverbial for decay.
The automobile cities of the west - LA, Phoenix, Houston – are the models for the future, and nobody is planning them at all.
You want to know about urbanism? Read Joel Garreau’s Edge City. It’s all about not ever needing to go into the old urban cores.
Architects have always dreamed of cities. But with a few special cases - and I’m not sure I’d want Brasilia or Chandigarh on my resume - cities since the era of Baron Hausmann in Paris have been shaped by developers, and if you don’t believe that read the collected works of NY Times architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable. Architects are dreamers without canvases.
And all the more so in suburbs and sprawl. I know that the Paris ring has three times the population of the city proper, just like in the US. London is awash in suburbs but the bulk of the “planning” goes toward reclaiming bits and pieces of unwanted land in unwanted sites in the center.
Asian cities are interesting and I have to admit I know less about them. But what I do read tells me they are replicating much of what has happened in the past. Skyscrapers go up to record heights, yes. Cities are more compact and apartment living is more prevalent than in the US where the single family home is the dominant mode. Governments have a heavier hand in controlling planning. But sprawl will eat them up as well. And nobody plans sprawl, by definition.
And you know what? Those earlier predictions of third world cities reaching 30 million populations have not come true. There appears to be a limit on how large a city can grow before people just stop going there. (Tokyo/Yokohama may be the exception, but even it has just barely touched 30 million.)
Maybe, just maybe, architects can work their magic on these Asian cities. But the problems you cite, which are very real, are not the sort that attract dreamer architects. (Especially all the ones you read about in architectural circles - none of whom have ever worked in city government, a fact that drives me crazy. The real jobs involve slogging day by day to deal with problems, lack of money, irate citizenry, and powerful interests who don’t want change. Architectural dreamers won’t touch these jobs - too much messy reality.
I apologize for typoing your name, Aro.
Oh, and dutchboy208, Aro mentioned Blade Runner in the OP. It is the worst depiction of a future city on film. Think about it. A world in which the best and brightest have gone off to other planets, leaving an underclass behind, but there is a 700[!]-story building that is the headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation. Who works there? (We see exactly one Tyrell employee and he works off-site!) Why do they work there? How do they get there? What kind of society requires this? Only the set designer and the art director and the dreamers who know that cities requires tall soaring or monolithic buildings but understand absolutely nothing else about them.
The city is dead. Long live the city.
P.S. I’m sorry to step on your dreams. I guess it’s because I once had dreams, too, and don’t any longer.
An interesting analysis. I think you are only partially correct though. To a certain extend the suburbs have now become a sprawling homogenious monument to conformity, medicocrity and blandness. I would hardly call the central cores of New York or Boston “dead”. Connecticut cities, yes. Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven are exactly as you described. Dead husks where people drive in to work and then flee at 6pm sharp back to their McMansion in Fairfield.
Since we are talking media depictions of urban life, I find it interesting how the image of the city has changed from the 60s to the present. Older movies about New York seemed darker. It was an isolating, crime filled place full of either very rich or very poor. Nowadays, you can go to the theater without seeing a movie about some young hip people living on the Upper East Side.
There is something about city life that attracts people. People aspire to work in Chicago, New York, Boston. No one aspires to work in an office park in Milford, CT.
But, people do like their space. That’s probably the biggest reason you will never see those giant hive cities in real life.
Larry Niven’s Oath of Fealty
is a pretty good read about a future city, Todos Santos, next door to Los Angeles. This was a huge hive-city and the people who lived there had every imagianble comfort as long as they were loyal to the city. Interesting concept.
Exapno Mapcase, my, great post! Well thought out and expressed.
Thanks all for the replies, especially Exapno Mapcase. Great post.
I would like to say that being the designer of cities is not featured in my dreams. (I have enough trouble with individual buildings!). I was just interested in them as a phenomenon.
I agree most people hate cities, but can come to rely on them. Some peole are even drawn to them. You’ve given me a lot to think about.
Glasgow is a city I know very well, having lived there for 5 years. I can say the centre has moved from being a industry led town to being a university and tourist centre. Tons of money has been spent to improve the facades of buildings and the public spaces. It is enjoying a brand new life at the hands of the local council. Its future is secured, albeit a very different one than it’s past may have suggested.
As you can tell, I am passionate on this subject. It started back in 1979 when I began working for city government, a decade that saw the city desperately trying to do a plan that would revive the rapidly disappearing downtown but whose efforts were at best irrelevant and at worst counterproductive.
I did an immense amount of reading in urban studies and city planning and developed a ferocious contempt - possibly unwarrantedly - for the planners who kept insisting that the people should behave in certain ways.
The American public - and by that I mean as I did above the vast majority of the people the vast majority of the time, not quite as fun a statement as people hate cities, which I am well aware is hyperbole - not only prefers but lusts and salivates for single family houses on the largest possible lot.
No matter. Over and over and over I would read proposals that would put apartments into suburbia, or even more oddly, group all the homes into one corner of a block abutting one another like town houses, and free up the rest of the space for communal greenery, ignoring any issues over who would own it and control it and maintain it and settle any disputes about it.
Efficiency was all that counted. But developers, who were spending their own money, wanted people to actually buy their houses and so built them big and then went to town councils and [sub]bribed[/sub] convinced them to amend the zoning codes to make the lots even bigger. If these developers thought of the efficient plans at all, they thought of them as useful landfill.
The dreamers’ plans for cities were even stranger. They kept vacillating between turning them into visions of small towns and Jane Jacob’s Greenwich Village of the 1950s and huge monolithic future cities with mile-high apartments entirely self-sufficient so that the inhabitants never had to go out into the city at all.
I quickly gained a huge admiration for those few who actually went out into the world and looked at the way people really functioned. My hero was the brilliant William H. Whyte, author of many classics, and the creator of the documentary film The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces which is so important that every city planner should be tied down in a Clockwork Orange chair with their eyes propped open and be forced to watch it all until it sinks in. It’s also a book, but it must be watched to truly get it.)
Whyte’s great understanding was that people like people. What makes for a living and viable downtown is foot traffic. (1000 people per hour at peak times minimum for viability.) Not only does this allow for a variety of stores small and large to flourish, but it attracts even more people. People like watching people and being around people. And people make for safety. Crowded streets have far less crime than deserted ones.
Ironically, the people who took this lesson to heart were mall developers. Only now are some cities beginning to get it. Manhattan always had this, and Boston and Chicago to a lesser extent, but look at all the cities who built downtown malls, and skyway systems that took people off the street, and parking garages that presented blank walls to passers-by who soon found other routes that seemed less dangerous and more interesting.
Since I was also a science fiction writer I became quite knowledgeable about cities in sf. In fact, I wound up giving a series of papers at academic conferences on the subject. I did one on Michael Bishop’s UrNu series that TeaRoses mentions at a conference at which Bishop was the guest speaker. That night he and the other sf writers there gathered in my room and we had a wonderful time talking (and deferring to his greatness).
Like a surprising number of other sf people, though, I thought Blade Runner was an idiocy and said so in print, which got me much maligned among the academic idolaters of the movie. C’est la vie.
Two other fascinating sf books -both dystopias - are John Brunner’s The Squares of the City and Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside. Brunner’s book was based on and written soon after Brasilia was founded and talks about the soullessness of a city created for monuments and not for the people who must live in it. In Silverberg’s world all of humanity, except a few farmers, live in mile-high Urbmons (Urban Monads), with a literal class hierarchy - the upper classes live on the upper floors and vice versa.
I always was passionate about the beautiful visions of cities in sf art myself. But I came to realize that all they will ever be are visions. They are sculpture and not architecture.
I haven’t followed the planning field as much since I left the city, so I don’t know if anyone since Garreau has properly looked at the suburbs to talk about its issues and future. Oh, I know there are many books decrying sprawl - almost all of them written by people living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan: feh - and there is the example of Portland, Oregon, who got the state to put limits on development, and a few other people preaching the gospel of metropolitan consolidation, but it feels to me that no one has yet done a Whyte-like analysis of suburbia to see what works and what can be replicated elsewhere given the sprawl we’ve made for ourselves. I know that 60s visions won’t cut it in the 21st century, though.
Aro, I’d be interested to hear what things you think came from these visions, where they are, and why they are working.
Interestingly enough, a thread on the decline and fall of the ‘American Empire’ has also mentioned Edge City and suburbia;
originally posted by BrainGlutton
so what can be the future of the city?
As much as I love the depiction of Megacity One (in the comicbooks rather than the film) I can’t see this dystopian urban nightmare developing in reality…
given reliable renewable energy resources it is likely that a modified form of suburban living will develop, with much more emphasis on public transport, and much more home working via information technology.
Why live and work on top of each other when you can interface electronically for 90% of your work and social interaction?
The emerging global commvillage will mean that remote wilderness areas might come under development pressure from telecommuters;
more ethical decisions to make…
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
Please note that those are not Brain Glutton’s words, but passages he was quoting from the works of James Howard Kunstler, one of those gurus of suburbia who live in Manhattan and dislike any society that is not visible from Central Park. I disagree with almost everything he has to say on the subject of cities and suburbs.
We have fifty years to come to grip with the end of the petroleum society, and while I never make predictions about the future, I don’t find alternatives as incredible as he seems to.
There will be massive technological change and therefore disruption in the future, but no one alive has yet any idea exactly what they will consist of. Expect the unexpected.
Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash is set in a dystopian time, only slight years in the future, with a far advanced version of the Internet.
It makes some wry commentary on society and technology.
The main character is Hiro Protagonist.
Do not forget Surf Nazis must Die, dumb film about a modern coastal city(set in very near future) after a massive quake, fuel shortages, badly dressed surfing gangs run everything, high minded low art from Troma.
'll be glad to answer this, but it will probably be Monday before I get the time, unfortunately. (lots of meetings to go to today).
Thanks again for your post.
Well lets consider for a moment how ridiculous the idea of the Megacities of Judge Dredd are. You have millions upon millions of people crammed into small fortified areas while the rest of the world is largely uninhabbited. Is there any reason why they couldn’t expand outwards? “Hey here’s an idea! How about a million of us go move into the ruins of Pennsylvania and set up another city where Philly used to be!”
And Washington DC in Minority Report. In a few short years they went from zoning no building higher then the monuments to freakin “Monolith City”? Please
Anyhow…
I wish I had a link to this article I read the other day. Basically, it discussed how the automobile has forced us to remodel our cities to automobile scale. It has ruined the sense of “community” since we are now forced to drive from place to place for even he simplest errend. With no public spaces to enjoy ourselves, we are forced to focus on modifying our own spaces - large isolated houses filled with gadgets, luxurious car interiors - or congregate in established areas like the town park or malls.
It seems to make sense. I can tolerate living in a studio in Manhattan because everthing I need is in walking distance. If I want to exercise, my Gym is round the block, I can go hang out in the park or at a coffee shop and read. The same room in the suburbs would feel like a prison cell.
Dystopia fiction seems to combine the worst of both worlds - tiny living conditions coupled with a lack of public spaces. Where are the Winter Gardens or Copley Plazas of Blade Runner?
In the Judge Dredd comics, the entire world has been blanketed with radioactive fallout; on top of that the surviving technology produces radioactive and toxic waste. The Mega-Cities provide an environment that’s kept decontaminated at enormous expense, and so space is limited. And fortification is necessary against hordes of mutated and bio-engineered monsters.
I’d hardly call the “Cursed Earth” scenerio in the Judge Dredd comics realistic, but it does have an internal logic.
There was that Christian Kirk Douglas movie from a few years ago. I think it was called Left Behind, and I would include it just because it represents a viewpoint that deviates radically from the Hollywood system, American Indie system, and foreign systems of movie making. Hell, these Christian movies are pretty great. One of them has Mr. T in it, kicking ass for the lord. Gotta respect that: that Jahweh’s a tough dude.
SOLARBABIES!!!
Solarbabies!
but seriously, no one has mentioned Logan’s Run.
Here’s an urban dystopia to end all urban dystopias: In David Wingrove’s eight(?)-volumeChung Kuo series (http://www.chungkuo.org/wingrove.html), the Chinese have conquered the world (in the process exterminating all races but Asians and Caucasians) and built seven continent-sized cities or arcologies, each 1,000 storeys tall, each made out of a miraculous lightweight plastic known as “ice.” The purpose behind the whole project was to make it possible for every man to have as many sons as he wishes, in each generation, forever – the Chinese idea of utopia. Of course, this works as well as you might expect – by the time the first volume opens, world population is in the hundreds-of-billions range. The Cities face a crowding crisis combined with a great many other social crises. One feature of life in the Cities is that the level you live on corresponds to your socioeconomic status – the aristocrats live on the top floors, the poor on the bottom, and in the space underneath the City is the original dirt, the “Clay,” inhabited only by undernourished savages. Crime is punished by demotion to a lower level. There is no right of privacy, security cameras are everywhere to make crime impossible to get away with. Nevertheless, crime gangs flourish in the lower levels. Outside the cities is some land which “peasants” farm. (That’s one part I find entirely implausible – that conventional farming, on a few leftover bits of land, could feed such a vast urban population!) Ruling over all are seven “T’angs,” Chinese-style emperors – one for City Europe, on for City Africa, etc.
The interesting thing about the Washington, D.C., of Minority Report is that it apparently is not intended as a dystopia. This ridiculous urban environment, with computer-animation ads screaming from every wall, and motor vehicles zooming up and down the sides of skyscrapers, apparently functions, with no more of poverty, crime or severe social problems than the Washington of today. The only notable exception is the illegal trade in human eyeballs, meant to fool the identity-scanners. And the people apparently live with all this cheerfully.
Posted by Exapno Mapcase:
Kunstler has done a lot more intelligent thinking and writing on this subject than Joel Garreau ever did, Exapno! I’ve read Garreau’s book, all right. And I’ve lived, shopped or worked in many different Edge Cities. I’ve never seen nor hear of one that worked well or had any vestige of dignity or beauty. Most importantly, I’ve never seen nor heard of an Edge City that was friendly to pedestrians, or even to bicyclists, or that was built in such a way that internal mass transit would even be practicable. It is absolutely impossible to get around without an automobile in Edge City. Garreau holds out hope for its future, but there is no way Edge City can become livable without fundamentally changing its structure, to a degree that would require a substantial amount of its existing buildings and highways to come under the bulldozers.
Another undeniable fact about Edge City: People live there. People shop there. People work there. Nobody goes to Edge City as a tourist, not unless they’re actually on a consumerist pilgrimage to the Mall of America or some similar abomination. Edge City is just not something anybody would want to look at. Have you ever seen a painter set up an easel on the shoulder of a suburban connector highway and set to work painting the streetscape? At least the urban dystopias discussed in this thread are sometimes interesting! Edge City is not. Never will be.
But you all can decide for yourselves – check out Kunstler’s website at http://www.kunstler.com. His “Eyesore of the Month,” a photogallery of architectural blunders, has a very direct impact.
Also see the Congress for the New Urbanism, http://www.cnu.org/. These are the people who are trying to actually do something about Edge City.
Joel Garreau has no website of his own but he has a subpage, “The Third Culture,” of a site called “Edge” at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/garreau.html.
Oh, and by the way, James Howard Kunstler does not live in Manhattan. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, and writes an on-line magazine, Civitas (available on his website), about the town’s public affairs, with special attention to planning and zoning decisions and building permits.
Posted by Anal Scurvy:
But what’s that got to do with urban dystopia?