“SCIENCE FICTION often gives short shrift to cities. Nothing says trouble, after all, like a great city smashed to smithereens on screen by natural cataclysms, creepy aliens in oversized flying saucers, or even an ill-tempered Godzilla.”
“When cities survive in SF cinema, they’re often places we’d rather not visit — nasty New York in Soylent Green (1973) and Escape from New York (1981), the antiseptic city of domes in Logan’s Run (1976), creepy underground Topeka in A Boy and His Dog (1975), or menacing Los Angeles in Blade Runner (1982).”
“Blade Runner’s dark and compelling city is a common touchstone for visualizing the urban future.”
“The film has come to epitomize popular conceptions of science fiction cities because it combines zippy technology, looming megabuildings, and a noir atmosphere borrowed from both Metropolis (1927) and The Big Sleep (1946).”
“this city of 2019 is heterogeneous, disordered, and active.”
“Blade Runner is the launch point for examining science fiction that celebrates the social vitality and cultural dynamism of urban life with its mix of creativity and community.”
“The film is a reminder that the essence of a city is not the physical container but the people it contains. Cities are where deals go down, ideas blossom, lovers arrange trysts, and conspirators hatch plots.”
“Sociologist Peter Langer suggests that our understanding of cities oscillates between two metaphors: city as jungle and city as bazaar.”
“In both conceptions, cities are places of thick social relations, diversity, and constant motion.”
“The urban jungle is intertwined, crowded, and marked by deadly competition for resources, but the city as bazaar “imagines the city as a place of astonishing richness of activity and diversity […] a market, a fair, a place of almost infinite exploration and opportunity, a center of exchange.””
“Film scholar Vivian Sobchack offers a variation, proposing “Trashtown” as shorthand for districts or cities that are vibrant, cluttered, and at the edge of respectability.”
“Science fiction’s theorist of the urban bazaar is Samuel R. Delany. In Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976) he coined the term “unlicensed sector” for districts on the social edge.”
“Here there’s vice and crime, to be sure, but also artistic expression that flourishes where rules don’t apply. The unlicensed sector in Tethys, the novel’s urban setting, has twisting back ways and dark alleys, but Delany presents it as inventive and alive.”
“Sprawling and fantastic New Crobuzon in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) goes the unlicensed sector of Tethys one better.”
“It’s a teeming multispecies city whose chaotic energy generates creative art and radical politics. The book opens in the public city at the Aspic Bazaar, where “all distinctions broke down” in “a blaring mess of goods, grease and tallymen.””
“Miéville’s New Crobuzoners enact the role of public space as articulated by design critics and social commentators like Richard Sennett, who argue that community identities are best formed, promoted, and defended in shared spaces.”
“This is not passive observation by one of Walter Benjamin’s flâneurs wandering the streets of Paris, but rather the creation of meaning by the active participation that is required for community life.”
“Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), argues that abstract plans do not create cities; instead, myriad individuals generate the meaning of urban space by moving through it, using it, and filtering it through their own perceptions and imaginations in ways beyond control and discipline.”
“New Crobuzon is chaotic and creative — the two central characters are an eccentric scientist and an eccentric artist. It is a realization of Delany’s unlicensed sector (even with an ever-present militia) and also a riff on John Stuart Mill’s venerable argument that interesting and vital cities are complex cities, places where social uncertainty and cultural creativity are inextricably intertwined.”
““It is hardly possible to overrate the value,” he wrote in 1848 in Principles of Political Economy,
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.”
“Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Science in the Capital” trilogy (2004–2007) also depicts a much maligned city — Washington, DC — where social institutions fray but hold under the stress of climate disaster.”
“As he did in earlier books like Pacific Edge (1990) and his Mars trilogy (1992–1996), Robinson explores the ways in which personal lives and civic lives interact. He takes the ordinary seriously, describing a city where community is created and maintained.”
“The action builds slowly, especially in the first volume (tellingly titled Forty Signs of Rain), paying close attention to commuting, child care, National Science Foundation (NSF) grant applications, and other quotidian routines.”
“The books intercut the crisis of global climate change with the struggles of managing a family including two high-achieving professionals and two kids. NSF scientists and a senatorial staffer make up the protagonists, trying to make scientific institutions and government work to cope with global climate change and its impacts. Dozens of pages detail committee meetings and bureaucratic strategizing that actually gets things done.”
“(Robinson does for science administration what Gregory Benford did for science practice in Timescape [1980].)”
“Massive floods and bitter winters pound the city. Robinson describes the physical impacts on the city, but also highlights the continuing importance of social bonds. Volunteers turn out to fight flooding. A group of homeless men create a miniature community in the depths of Rock Creek Park. In the great freeze, civic institutions still work. First responders and hospitals are stressed, but they function. People turn out to help. Hundreds of volunteers coordinate an effort to monitor escaped zoo animals. Park rangers and work crews are upbeat as they clear downed trees and direct citizens pitch in until their workplaces reopen. By taking Washington, DC, seriously as a functional community rather than an aberration, Robinson challenges a knee-jerk reaction among many Americans and highlights his longstanding commitment to the importance of civic life.”
“The books extend his repeated argument that utopia is a process rather than an end state — “utopia is when our lives matter,” as one of his earlier characters says.”
“Robinson recognizes that cities may sometimes be responsible for their own dissolution by fire, famine, flood, or abandonment, but that cities also have thickly woven social relationships and the social capital that is the source of resilience.”
“Thick civic and social networks support short-term survival and long-term innovation.”
“Rebecca Solnit, in A Paradise Built in Hell (2010), convincingly argues that it is elites who panic in civic emergencies and ordinary folks who cope and cooperate, a result that Robinson dramatizes.”
“Modern cities benefit not only from internal strength but from the sometimes maligned global economy that allows them to draw resources from vast distances far more effectively than premodern places that succumbed to conquest or climate change.”
“Robinson understands the power of social and psychological ties that bind residents to their cities, and he also understands the scale of third-millennium society.”
“Interesting cities are complex cities — places of possibility intertwined with the problems created by change. New Crobuzon is endlessly fascinating, and Samuel R. Delany’s Tethys remains intriguing. The distributed city of Battlestar Galactica and the teeming space station metropolis of Babylon 5 support richer stories than the thin communities of the Star Trek universe.”
“As science fiction writer Kathleen Ann Goonan has written in Paradoxa,
Cities are, simply put, places where we come together to survive, where the symbiosis and mix of many humans becomes heady and elixirlike, leading to new intellectual, artistic, and emotional realms; leading also to the decay which occurs when old forms — physical and social — are no longer viable but still remain.”
“Out of those tensions of change and stability come the complex communities of creative and resilient cities that are more common in speculative fiction than the Blade Runner trope might lead us to believe.”
“Carl Abbott is Professor Emeritus of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University.”